By popular demand, theologian, author and fellow Stacker Paul Tyson returns to this podcast!

We chat about the Jason Arday controversy, a defining, and tragic, episode of the DEI era. Since we recorded this conversation the fallout from the scandal continues with Simon & Schuster releasing the former Cambridge professor’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, and an inquest opened into his death.

Meanwhile, Nathan Cofnas, the philosopher who first raised allegations of plagiarism against Arday, was suspended by his employer, Ghent University in Belgium, on allegations of “discriminatory conduct”, and UK Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, is calling for curbs on press reporting. Wokeism, alas, is far from dead.

If you’re not across this tumultuous story, not to worry: I give a 10 minute-long primer. If you are across it, maybe you want to press the forward button.

Paul and I also touch on the sexual orientation and religion questions in the Australian census. And we discuss his new book with the subtle title, Gender Theory is Wrong — endorsed by several rock-star gender-critical philosophers — in which he argues trans ideology is a product of the Enlightenment gone wrong.

You can buy Paul’s book from the publisher here.

And on Amazon here.

Subscribe to his Substack, Gender Critical Philosophical Theology, here.

Only part of this podcast is accessible to regular subscribers. The full episode is just for paid subscribers. To become one of them, click below.

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This is a longer version of a double book review first published in the Australia/Israel Review.

**

When We See You Again
Rachel Goldberg-Polin
Hachette, 2026, 288 pp. $34.95

Hostage: The unflinching first memoir by an Israeli hostage
Eli Sharabi
Swift Press, 2025, 208 pp. $34.95

It will be years before the full story of October 7, Israel’s worst-ever massacre, is told. Two recent memoirs – When We See You Again from Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the global face of the hostage families movement, and Eli Sharabi’s self-explanatory Hostage – intersect and complement one another.

For some of his harrowing 491 days in captivity, Sharabi was held alongside Goldberg-Polin’s son, Hersh, in a tunnel in Gaza. Hersh, abducted from the Nova Music Festival, where a Hamas grenade blew off half his dominant left forearm, endured for 328 days what his mother describes as “an odyssey of suffering, starvation, and torment that is hard for me to cook into digestible words.” In late August 2024, he was executed at close range along with five others, who became collectively known in their anguished homeland as “The Beautiful Six”.

Sharabi, wrenched from his wife, Lianne, and daughters, Noiya, 16, and Yahel, 13, on Kibbutz Be’eri, yearned for their reunion, only to find, upon his release from gruelling captivity that, contrary to what his kidnappers had encouraged him to believe, his whole family had been murdered on October 7.

His journey through loss takes place beyond the last page. Goldberg-Polin, by contrast, writes from within a maelstrom of forever grief. She is under the “metaphorical 18-wheeler semitruck” that suddenly hit her and husband Jon (and their two daughters) as they were “meandering down the road” of what she, somewhat unconvincingly, calls their “beige” lives.

For her, October 7 ruptured time into Before and After, the latter bleeding into the former. She shifts back-and-forth between past and present with fatalism, or sometimes with faith. She finds comfort in philosophy through the ages, from the mythological Sisyphus to the Biblical Job, the grieving father whose “four simple words” speak to her: “God gives, God takes. The rest is commentary.”

It feels uncomfortable to have to review this book as a literary work. By what criteria should I judge the raw lamentation of a mother confronting the cruellest paradox of all: her child, the oldest of three, lies beneath the earth in a pretty spot overlooking a forest, while her love for him keeps growing? As the “About” note at the end tells us, Goldberg-Polin, born and raised in Chicago, is an educator who lives in Jerusalem with her husband, Jon. “They are the parents of three children.”

It is also feels uncomfortable to contest her decision to write from the universal premise that “what binds us is pain.” Even if that statement is true her story, like all true stories, as opposed to fables, are rooted in the particular. Especially this story, bound up as it is in turbulent historical events destined to be rehearsed, memorialised and debated years into the future.

So the reader wanting the inside story of Goldberg-Polin’s epic lobbying campaign for her son and the other hostages won’t find it here. Most of those episodes, including her meeting with the Pope, are rendered impressionistically — as if viewed from the aeroplanes in which she finds temporary respite. “I don’t remember how it came together, but somehow we were going to the United Nations,” she writes.

“I remember… being on a Zoom call with the US president [Joe Biden isn’t named] and the twelve families of Americans who were missing.” One of the mothers left the (virtual) room only to return with news her second daughter was also found dead. “The president put his head into his hands on his desk and wept.”

She remembers a “worrisome and unsettling” trip “to a land where we should not have been… meeting with people who knew the people holding Hersh and the others.” This is possibly a reference to what we know was her and Jon’s lobbying of Qatari officials. She alludes to a potential deal sunk by the “loose lips” of an “Important Person” in Israel, but her sense of grievance about the Netanyahu Government’s handling of hostage negotiations is detectable only to readers already in the know. Nor does this inspiring teacher of Jewish studies dwell on the humanist, religious Zionism that led her and Jon to migrate to Israel or on the jihadists who exploited her son in propaganda videos before killing him.

The global outbreak of Jew-hatred is mentioned only in passing. She was warned she’d be “hated off the stage” at the Democratic National Convention but instead received a standing ovation. We’re left to contemplate the moral dissolution signified in the warning that a desperate mother of a civilian hostage might be hated off a stage, just as we’re left reeling at the officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva who “talked forever” about why they could not and would not demand access to the hostages.

At times her prose is devastating. When Jon tells her of online rumours that six bodies were found in a tunnel under Rafah with Hersh among them, “Something flew out of me and went directly up through the ceiling.”

And yet as October 7 marks the ravaging of Goldberg-Polin — her period stopped, “even my teeth have shifted” — we glimpse in a shadow narrative Hersh’s untimely personal becoming. For much of the book he is the good-natured, soccer-mad festival-goer with a “cliche” feather earring, a plane ticket booked for Goa and The Art of Happiness bookmarked on his bedside table. His front tooth, broken since his barmitzvah she tells us in an unbearably intimate chapter that maps almost every inch of her lost son’s body, still had temporary bonding “awaiting a more final solution.”

But gradually a portrait emerges of a young man who drew on his extensive reading about the Holocaust to meet his own tragic historical moment with astonishing grace and courage that made him an emblem at home.

As the returned hostage Or Levy told the grateful Goldberg-Polins, in the tunnels, Hersh had spread the gospel of Holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning. We can withstand hell, Frankl wrote, so long as we have a Why, a purpose for living.

When Sharabi hears Hersh’s incantation of Frankl during their three days together in the tunnel, the words “feel like a gift,” he recounts in Hostage.

Where Goldberg-Polin uses abstraction to give shape to her torment, Sharabi’s narration is spare and unsentimental, as concrete as the airless tunnels in which he was held. We’re riveted from the first line: “Five terrorists enter with weapons drawn.”

Former Israeli spokesperson Eylon Levy is credited with the Sharabi book’s English translation. And that’s fitting because Hostage demolishes the edifice of anti-Israel propaganda with unvarnished facts.

Driven into Gaza alongside Khun, a Thai guest worker from a nearby kibbutz, Sharabi must rely on his terrorist captors as a shield against the “sea of people… trying to rip me from limb to limb.”

His account provides evidence for myriad Israeli claims about the Hamas military’s commandeering of civilian infrastructure: he is held, variously, in mosques, from which shafts lead deep into the tunnels, in private homes, and in a children’s bedroom with windows “branded in the letters: UNRWA” and from where he hears Hamas’ rockets being launched.

“For the first time,” he writes at one point, “we see UN aid boxes” in the tunnel. (So Hamas exploited civilian aid after all.)

At every turn our hunger for details is satisfied. Most intriguing are the Hamas operatives, so finely observed even though Sharabi’s glasses were shattered on the 7th — just as well, as he’s spared from seeing the worm infestation in the tunnel where sewage overflowed the cesspit. He and his fellow prisoners give their captors nicknames based on their appearance, roles or personalities, such as The Mask, The Cleaner and The Nightingale (for his nice singing voice.)

There is the chilling figure of The German, a courteous blonde with flawless English who turns up to film propaganda videos and check on the hostages’ health. And The Trash — who metes out a beating that leaves Sharabi immobile for a month.

Of another he writes: “The best indicator of his mood is how tightly he fastens our leg cuffs.”

The captors’ moods change according to the “martyrs” tally — when one day the hostages are given sweets, “they gleefully tell us Iran launched a massive missile at Israel.” But their ideology is rigid. Arabic-speaking Sharabi is told he should go back to Morocco or Yemen from where his grandparents came. The hostages are offered bribes to embrace Islam — they refuse, doubling down on Jewish rituals. We learn that the gunmen’s ultimate term of abuse is “Abbas,” after the despised Palestinian Authority president.

The terrorists are variously studies in paranoia (a bruise on Sharabi’s arm sparks fears of an IDF tracking device) and envy — there are incessant questions about prices and salaries in Israel. (“Hada millian!” They’re millionaires, the terrorists proclaimed as they butchered the kibbutzniks of Be’eri.) One of Sharabi’s “host” families treat him with reverence after learning he has a degree in economics.

As a group the gunmen revel in humiliating the prisoners; as individuals they talk lovingly to their children on the phone, and as the war grinds on, cry softly at night. Sharabi describes “genuine” joy when he’s reunited with “Orange,” an earlier captor, but ultimately confesses, “I don’t give a shit about them.”

He’s a father figure to his three fellow hostages, especially to the gentle Ohel, stopping the younger men from succumbing to self pity. “I realize they’ve got a basic lack of situational awareness,” he notes, somewhat comically. As the food rations dwindle, Sharabi’s collectivist ethos of “unto every man what he needs and deserves,” likely saves them all.

In his telling he breaks down only once safely in the Red Cross vehicle with “Felicity,” a New Zealander with kind eyes. His fellow prisoner berates her for abandoning the hostages but Sharabi is impatient for his future.

In captivity he dreamed of moving his family to Lianne’s native UK where he’d never again confront terror in their eyes. But on the helicopter ride to Tel-HaShomer hospital the by now bereft husband and father contemplates his “beautiful, green, wounded beloved land of Israel.” Asked upon landing if he wishes to disembark wrapped in an Israeli flag, his response is emphatic.

Lest the question was ever in doubt, the calamity of October 7 showed Israel has a Why, and it’s not giving up any time soon.

My dad once told me about a Hungarian friend of his, a fellow Holocaust survivor, who ended up in Israel. Politically, tribally, the man’s profile was typical of most European Zionists; left-of-centre, with no time for the religious settler movement and supportive of a two-state solution with the Palestinians, at least in the days before the Second Intifada that killed roughly 1000 Israeli civilians and with them popular support for the land-for-peace process.

But the friend had confided to my father a guilty secret: each time he heard Palestinian or UN officials or some such refer to Israel as “an occupier” he couldn’t help experiencing a frisson. Because it was thrilling to hear a people wretched only yesterday, sitting ducks for pogroms and industrial-scale genocide, now described as imperial conquerers.

Whether consciously or otherwise, the protestors in Western capitals screaming “death to the IDF” and “globalise the intifada” are demanding Jews return to their default historical state of powerlessness, to a perpetual October 7 when Jewish self-defence failed and the past visited the present for one dark day.

The piece below is about my father, and my mother, and their euphoria 50 years ago on a day of audacious Jewish self-defence, the raid on Entebbe. It was first published in The Weekend Australian, but I’m sharing it now, lightly edited, because I decided I couldn’t live without this cover photo from the telemovie of the event and got tangled in correspondence with Getty Images, which finally licensed me to use it at a cheaper-than-advertised price. I remember watching the flick, entranced, mum and dad on the couch beside me. What stayed with me most was the dead-eyes of the fanatical character of German terrorist, Brigitte Kuhlmann, played here by Mariclare Costello, best known for her somewhat more wholesome role as schoolteacher Rosemary Hunter Fordwick in The Waltons.

I’m pairing this piece with a double book review on the October 7 hostages, which I’ll post tomorrow.

**

In early July 1976, my parents took me to Lake Balaton, a popular resort town in western Hungary. I was six so it’s hard to be sure I actually remember part of what I’m about to relate or whether I’ve reconstructed the context retrospectively.

As we reclined in our bathers by the lake – I have this image of a very blue lake, people lying on towels on the grass and a bouncy ball, red with white spots – I remember sensing a strange tension in the air. My parents seemed restless and preoccupied.

Was there talk about an aeroplane hijacking? About hostages?

Again, I can’t be sure, but I am certain about what came next.

We were heading out from our room at the resort motel when my father stopped, frozen, outside another room from which we heard sounds of a cheerful gathering. My father told Mum that he heard someone inside the room, a man, exclaim in Hungarian, “Well, let’s drink a toast to the Jews!”

He and Mum stared at one another for what seemed like a long time in an era without internet and smartphones.

“Knock on the door,” she insisted. He knocked. A man came to the door.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Dad said, “but I heard you say ‘Let’s drink a toast to the Jews.’ Can you please tell me why you said that?”

And the man at the door explained, at least I now know he explained, that Israeli commandos executed a daring raid on Entebbe International Airport in Uganda where terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the German far-left Baader-Meinhof Gang were threatening to execute 103 hostages from a hijacked Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris.

I now know that as Israeli officials played at negotiating the terrorists’ demands for the release of their fellow militants from jail, their military had flown four Hercules C-130H cargo planes carrying a few hundred soldiers 4000km from Israel to Uganda where dictator Idi Amin had given the hijackers safe port. Under cover of darkness the elite commandos stormed the terminal building, killing all seven hijackers and dozens of Ugandan soldiers, and destroying 11 Ugandan MiG fighter jets on the ground.

Three hostages were killed in the crossfire and one commando was killed in action, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, brother of Benjamin.

As a six-year-old on that day in July, I only knew that my dad turned to my mum and said “They rescued the hostages” with a look on his face I’d never seen before. Eyes beaming, cheeks flushed with euphoria. Because, I understood later, here was the promise of Zionism made good – a Jewish state that would go to the ends of the Earth to protect its own. This was what “Never again” looked like to my Holocaust survivor parents. Even as a six-year-old I grasped that moment in the hallway of the Lake Balaton resort, the blazing pride in my father’s eyes, was about something more than a hostage drama.

I now also know that the significance of Entebbe extends not only to the past, rewriting a 2000-year-old story of Jewish defencelessness, but into the post-October 7 present. Entebbe is seen as the psychological backdrop for Israel’s Prime Minister: where his older brother had died a hero to secure freedom for hostages, under Benjamin Netanyahu’s watch 251 people were brutally abducted from southern Israel in a colossal military and intelligence failure. It’s hard to imagine that as he weighed Israel’s options in the Gaza war Netanyahu wasn’t assessing his potential legacy against that of his brother.

Might the war have ended earlier or differently had Israel’s Prime Minister not been grappling with familial ghosts at his nation’s crucial hour? I’m sceptical: the war endured largely because the fanatics of Hamas for too long did not come under sufficient international pressure to release the hostages. Still, we can’t discount this psychoanalytical dimension to Israel’s leader, whose persistent refusal to resign or establish a full commission of inquiry into the failures of October 7 will dog him to Israel’s ballot later this year. As will the patchy outcomes in Gaza and Lebanon where Hamas and Hezbollah remain armed and standing, cheered on by a growing contingent of the global left.

Here, too, the Entebbe episode is a portent of today’s toxic climate of Jew-hatred. At the airport the would-be revolutionaries of the Baader-Meinhof, or Red Army Faction, Wilfried Bose and Brigitte Kuhlmann, notoriously separated from the other passengers not just the Israelis but also the Jews. They were not oblivious to the historical resonances of Germans selecting Jews at gunpoint – on the contrary, the pair debated the ethics between themselves. (He had his qualms: she did not.)

As the Hungarians in the motel room affectionately put it, the glory of Entebbe belonged to the Jews. They did not propose a toast to “the Zionists”, despite this being the politically correct term of the Soviet era, one that offered a veneer of political respectability to the racist delegitimising of the Jewish state.

Are today’s Israel-hating far-leftists hotly debating their proximity to anti-Jewish racism? If yes, they’re keeping these deliberations discreetly in-house. Every day brings news of Jewish communities targeted under the banner of anti-Zionism. The writers and academics demanding “Zionists” be excluded from cultural spaces – that even a prestigious history prize such as the Dan David be returned because it is tainted by links to “genocidal” Israel. (Translation: it is tainted with Jewish blood money.)

In June a black-shirted anarchist group marched through the Greek city of Thessaloniki in “anti-Zionist patrols” – an echo of the city’s anti-Jewish pogrom of June 1931. Then, as now, the perpetrators stalking Jews wore black shirts.

Last month, a many thousand-strong crowd at the opening of the bull run festival in Pamplona held up, for the second year in a row, a banner reading, “Destroy Israel”. This from the nation that expelled its Jews during the Inquisition, and succumbed to fascism in the 1930s. In the warped logic of anti-Zionism a singular call to destroy the world’s only Jewish state is an anti-racist position and not the opposite.

Zohran Mamdani, mayor of the most populous Jewish city outside of Israel, said he cannot support Israel because the country “privileges” one religion over others. Don’t worry, he assures us, he can’t support Saudi Arabia either. Strangely, though, no one’s marching in New York to dismantle Saudi Arabia. And while Israel’s population is about 20 per cent Muslim, the Middle East and North Africa is cleansed of Jews and largely cleansed of Christians. Is Mamdani oblivious to his own fascist apologia or does Israel hatred run so deep in his cultural DNA he mistakes it for a law of nature?

The Jewish state is seen as fair game for demonisation, a category that bears no relation to “criticism” of its government’s policies. Israel is sport, quite literally. When Egypt had a win in the recent World Cup, players raised the Palestine flag, even in Australia. When later Argentina beat Egypt, triumphant fans gloated by unfurling the Israeli flag. Do you barrack for the collective Jew or against it? Either way, Jews are reduced to symbols in a global morality play.

The Israeli hostages of October 7 were all but abandoned by the UN and human rights organisations. In her memoir, When We See You Again, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of Hersh, who was executed at close range along with five others in a tunnel in Gaza, recalls pleading for her son with officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. “We’re left reeling,” she writes, as they “talked forever” about why they could not and would not demand access to the hostages.

Even as it unfolds, again and again history makes the case for Zionism. And I felt this was true even before I knew it was the day the Israelis stormed Entebbe, from the look in my father’s eyes.

On Census night the computer screen is aglow and the hour late as we sit there, my beloved and I, embarking on our civic duty. Only this time, for the first time ever, we’re bracing ourselves, surly, or at least wary, of what lies ahead.

The Census form says it’s going to ask questions about blah and blah and cultural background, and already my mind is whirring, wrestling with the term, because why “cultural background” why not just “background” or “ethnicity,” or national origin, something scientific and concrete because what is “culture” actually, and how can the Census nail, measure and quantify culture? And my beloved other half is already muttering under his breath, “of course, I’ll bet that doesn’t apply to me, I don’t have a culture,” because the poor sod’s just a white Anglo-Celt, and so on.

The first hurdle is our address because for some reason it tends to confound the system, rarely appearing in the autocomplete dropdown suggestions — mail frequently goes astray, uber drivers are routinely confused — we’re usually having to manually type it. This time the autocomplete dropdown suggests a near-enough approximation of our address, technically the number is off by two, still, we figure near-enough-is-good-enough.

Who is home? Who is away?

A stab of tenderness: our older daughter has just gone overseas on uni exchange and we’re pining for the absent child, and now we’re hesitating because the wording is confusing, it’s unclear whether we’re supposed to acknowledge her absent presence or not — the answer appears to hinge on whether she is filling in her own form — and the categories, the reasons for absence, don’t quite fit, although I guess they’re near-enough, the linguistic equivalent of two numbers off.

We move on.

To Ground Zero of what our fearful leader calls a “culture war.”

What was Julie’s sex recorded at birth?

Gnashing of teeth.

What was the sex recorded at birth, the Australian Bureau of Statistics wants to know, as if there is no other reality than language, than choices of words, and as we know words can be inaccurate, imprecise, arbitrary. Sex, the Census implies, can be recorded wrong, we must leave room for doubt, be on alert for human error, so many obstetricians who can’t tell up from down, north from south, Arthur from Martha.

But sex, even when it’s not recorded, even when babies are born to illiterate mothers in remote wilds untouched by Judith Butler’s enduring idiocy, even then sex exists, enduring throughout a lifetime, rigid and unyielding. No matter what the courts say.

Let history record Census night 2026 as the trans’ing of Australia, the queering of national statistics.

What is Julie’s gender?

This question refers to how Julie currently identifies or expresses their gender, which may be different to sex at birth.

Man

Woman

Non-binary

Julie uses another term (specify)

Prefer not to answer

We knew this was coming, of course. The Labor party, a party increasingly inclined to play to the lowest woke denominator, had promised while in opposition to track “LGBTIQ” identity in the next census. Later, Anthony Albanese tried to pull the pin, melting down in cabinet, insisting questions on gender identity were “inappropriate” and “complicated”, only to cave in to the queer insurgents among Labor staffers (and nervous MPs in Greens-threatened seats) who all but proclaimed the questions to be of life and death significance — pass over the unicorns and Albo will cause these vulnerable souls irreversible, catastrophic psychic harm of the sort he cannot wish upon his conscience, and so on.

But seeing it there, on the screen, this brazen assault on truth and fact, this mockery of everything The Census should stand for, is .. scary. Disorientating.

Gender: a word much like “culture,” lacking in shape or contours. It, “gender,” references — what exactly? Haircuts? Necklines? How can I trust this organ of state, the ABS, when it’s channeling fads and furries?

Expletives.

“Gender-fuck.”

I tell my beloved that a few years back NHS doctors in Britain were taught “gender-fuck” is a “gender identity,” a term used “when people don’t give a fuck about gender".

“So let’s just say we’re ‘gender-fuck.’”

And the government wishes to know who we prefer to fuck, in the event all options are on the table on a boozy Saturday night, probing next on sexual orientation, which also irritates me, because once again the answer is unverifiable — assertion, not hard evidence. We’re told this information about bedroom habits or would-be habits is about improving health and other services, including community services, for “LGBTQ” communities, which presumably means more dedicated “trans-inclusive” community services for lesbians where they might be gently persuaded to broaden their horizons and suck lady-dick.

I imagine all the non-English speakers and the barely English speakers stumped by “sex recorded at birth,” and “non-binary.” Maybe if the questions are lost in translation the results will show a delightful preponderance of queers in Lakemba.

Ancestry: I’m prepared for this one.

For we Jews have plotted and conspired and caballed, as Jews like to do, devising a cunning plan to be counted twice. First under Ancestry, where I type, “Ashkenazi Jewish” and then under Religious Affiliation where I write “Jewish”, never mind that I’m an atheist fundamentalist. We children of Israel will resist attempts to erase us, the tiny number of us, from campuses and “cultural” spaces, from Bondi Beach and the face of the earth.

Countries of birth.

Options listed: Australia, England, India, New Zealand, The Phillipines, Vietnam, South Africa. The note underneath explains: these countries were “the most commonly reported countries of birth in the 2021 Census.”

Wait, we say, something is strange; where is China? China: home to the third-largest migrant group? We scratch our heads. When I look it up afterwards, I learn the omission was deliberate, and not new. Since 1991, the ABS says, it’s left China off the list “to encourage specific answers for this question such as China, Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan.”

Or Taiwan?

Well, Xi Jinping would be pleased at the suggestion the Taiwanese need encouragement to see themselves as divisible from the Communist mainland.

When finally, at the end, at the end of the strange and confusing Census form, we’re asked if we agree to the information being kept by the National Archives of Australia and made publicly available after 99 years, I yelp, “no,” I say no, I don’t agree, because, who knows, in 99 years the Chinese Communist Party might rule Australia and use my Census form to sinister ends; who knows, in 99 years it might still be hunting season on Jews, maybe worse than now, and Jew haters will use my Census form to track my descendants, and anyway, it is late and I’ve thought about “gender,” and “culture” for way too long.

And sadly, very sadly, at this moment in time, and maybe it’s only exhaustion talking, but at this moment I don’t trust the government, or any future government, or really, the future full stop, given that the government will be deciding policy for unicorns. But maybe, if by the next Census, in 2031, maybe if, in five years’ time, the fever has broken and I’m still in Australia, I’ll reconsider.

Maybe, in 2031, I’ll agree to let people know in 99 years’ time that a Jewish woman lived here at an approximate address, and that for a while she feared the country of her recorded birth was losing its grip, but in the end it worked out OK.

Victoria’s new premier Ben Carroll is putting his stamp on the top brass of the government and the bureaucracy, firing loyalists of the Andrews-Allan regime and hiring in their place some old hands from the earlier — and steadier — Bracks-Brumby era. So far, so good, in my view, although whether the urgent surgery can save Labor come November’s state election is doubtful.

Before I move on to slamming the door on Harriet Shing, one of the Allan loyalists who has announced she won’t be seeking another term in Parliament, a few clarifications about my previous post, A Very Labor Coup, in which I intentionally let rip my dissatisfaction with the Allan government. I’m hardly alone in expressing such sentiments; undoubtedly many people will still be voting Labor in November, it’s just that I’m yet to meet them.

But lest there be any confusion; when I described the government as “Marxist,” I was being hyperbolic for comic effect. I didn’t mean it … much. It’s also worth acknowledging that future generations of Victorians won’t care that the state’s vastly expanded road and transport systems came at a horrendously inflated cost to taxpayers after the government allegedly turned a blind eye to union corruption and criminality in the building process. They will enjoy the benefits of the Big Build. I’m already enjoying the gleaming, artsy, conveniently configured Metro Tunnel train line.

And to be brutally honest, when it comes to public infrastructure investment the default setting for the contemporary Tories is: nada. Let’s not pretend that dispatching Labor governments inflicts no costs on the greater good. Voters down here tried it in 2010 only to reverse their choice four years later, disillusioned with the complacency of the born-to-rule mob.

Nonetheless, I’m as angry as I sound about the colossal government waste, the crime, the “pro-Palestine” fascists given full licence to rule the streets, the totalitarian “hate” speech legislation with the potential to muzzle critics of the official state religion — gender identity ideology, the belief system that obfuscates biological sex.

Harriet Shing is one of the government’s chief enforcers of gender identity ideology. She was elected in 2014 as a representative of the Eastern Victoria Region, taking in high-need farming districts and regional centres — not voters inclined to reward lethargy, so we might happily assume she brought energy to representing them. She also has commendable achievements in the housing portfolio, steering the redevelopment of public housing towers, a contentious-but-necessary project, and other achievements in her various senior portfolios. She is also associated with controversies involving water, infrastructure and government transparency and accountability, none of which interest me right now.

At the time she was appointed to the ministry in 2022, the media trumpeted the first “openly” lesbian frontbencher. (As opposed to a previous lesbian minister who worked hard to improve the lot of Victorian women but, while in no way trying to deny her sexuality, wasn’t the flag-waving type.)

As minister for equality, Shing worked hard to undermine women’s equality in her evangelical pursuit of measures erasing sex-based rights. “Trans women are women” was her long-time mantra, and I mean that quite literally, the feverish incantation rolling off her tongue and social media posts.

One episode in particular enrages to this day.

**

In August 2022 the Herald Sun reported that inmates at Victoria’s Dame Phyllis Frost Correctional Centre were petitioning authorities to remove a trans-identified male offender from the women’s prison. The offender, referred to at trial by the pseudonym, “Moira Wills,” had pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a woman in a Richmond street. The victim described him as 180cm tall with a “strong grip” and wearing a dress.

He’d previously served time in another jurisdiction for the aggravated sexual abuse of his six-year old biological daughter. About a year prior to his arrest for the child abuse he had started transitioning and in the words of a County Court judge, “living as a woman”.

At sentencing, the County Court judge noted the 44 year-old had experienced an awareness of his female gender identity from an early age. “Your experience of gender confusion and dysphoria during your formative years resulted in repeated traumas culminating in a psychological breakdown at the age of eight,” the judge found.

“On balance the subjective circumstances of your childhood are such that they do operate to reduce your moral culpability to a limited extent.”

Victoria’s “guiding principle” in housing prisoners was that “a person should be imprisoned in the prison of their gender rather than their sex assigned or assumed at birth.” This would have come as a shock to most people.

These days the global list of violent males, many of them recidivist sex offenders and paedophiles, incarcerated alongside women to sometimes predictably awful consequences is so staggeringly long the scandal is finally thrust into public view. At a press conference in February then premier Allan was questioned about revelations, again in the Herald Sun, of a secret government payout to a female prisoner, a young mother, who was sexually assaulted at Tarrengower, a minimum security female prison. Absent on this occasion was the premier’s performative eye-roll and the “I-get-so-emotional-about-this-subject” sanctimony ordinarily deployed to signal contempt for the journalist daring to raise more than legitimate questions on “trans.” This time a stony and robotic Allan looked off into the middle distance, deflected some questions to Corrections Victoria and otherwise repeatedly emphasised recent changes to policy settings “to make sure that that is absolutely clear that the safety and wellbeing of all prisoners is considered first and foremost in the placement of prisoners.”

From which we might conclude that the safety and wellbeing of all prisoners — read: women — had until then not been the first and foremost consideration in the placement of trans-identified males.

In sentencing Wills to three years and three months jail for the Richmond assault, the judge found poor prospects for rehabilitation.

“I am satisfied beyond reasonable doubt, that you will pose a risk to the sexual safety of one or more persons or to the community upon your release from custody.”

He was placed in a segregated unit at Phyllis Frost. A prison social worker and psychologist aired hopes that “she” might eventually be “fully integrated” into the prison. The psychologist, who had interviewed Wills for a total period of three hours via teleconference over three consecutive days, wrote in what the judge described as a “comprehensive” report:

“Ms Wills’ gender dysphoria and trauma symptoms have clearly re-emerged and worsened in the context of long-term segregation and isolation in custody, where her differential treatment even from other transgender offenders and female sex offenders acts as a persistent reminder that she is ‘different’ and ‘inferior.’”

**

On learning Wills had been placed at Phyllis Frost with a plan of eventually integrating him into the prison, inmates took the unusual step of launching a petition to demand his removal. They went out of their way to stress they had no problem with transgender prisoners, but were concerned about this one because of the history of violent sexual assault and the inmate having a “working penis.”

Many women at Phyllis Frost are victims of sexual assault or close to such victims, the petition stated.

“Consequently, they carry significant trauma associated with this experience,” it read.

“Therefore, upon hearing this news … the mental wellbeing of many of the women was severely compromised.

“They became visibly upset as they were triggered and traumatised.

“We feel threatened, unsafe, distressed and traumatised with this current situation. ­Accordingly, we demand that (the inmate) be immediately removed from the .. unit.”

The petition was reportedly sent to the Minister for Corrections, the Department of Justice and Community Safety, Corrections Victoria and the ­Ombudsman.

**

After the Herald Sun published the story, representatives from two gender-critical organisations, Rachael Wong from Women’s Forum Australia and Stassja Frei from the Coalition for Biological Reality, sent letters in support of the female prisoners to 14 politicians and heads of government agencies from then premier Dan Andrews down. Andrews and then Minister for Women Natalie Hutchins failed to respond, others declined to intervene or passed the buck.

It was a disgraceful performance all round, including from the Liberal frontbenchers who likewise received the advocates’ letter. But even amid the rank cowardice and arguably criminal negligence, Shing’s reply stands out as “particularly disappointing,” as Wong and Frei put it with diplomatic understatement. Here it is in full:

She first “wanted to acknowledge” the trans community’s feeling of “distress and fatigue” as a result of “ongoing debates about their rights,” and the work still to be done to combat “misinformation and stigma.” (Then, the usual deflection to the Justice Department and Corrections Victoria.)

But in their letter to Shing, Wong and Frei, who the minister addresses by their first names, had said nothing about “the trans community.” You can read their letter here. They were objecting to “a violent male sex offender” being housed in a female prison alongside the state’s most marginalised women, many with traumatic histories of sexual violence and a disproportionate number of them indigenous.

And for these truly vulnerable women, the Minister for Equality in a state touted as the most progressive in the land couldn’t express even a token gesture of understanding or acknowledgment, let alone compassion or empathy.

For in (deeply regressive) Victoria some people are more equal than others. The needs of male sex offenders routinely take precedence above those of female rape victims so long as the rapists themselves identify as female.

The only mystery is whether politicians such as Shing and Allan honestly believe in tragic fairytales where a woman is trapped inside the body of a recidivist male sex offender and paedophile — and curiously, only reveals herself after sentencing to a male prison. Hard to know which is worse: that these politicians are indeed true believers and therefore gullible and credulous to dangerous ends, or that they’re all too aware they’ve been led spectacularly astray by trans ideology but can only respond with doubling-down and relying on attacks against critics as the best form of defence.

We could ask the same question of Labor across a range of policy areas from crime to union corruption: are they spectacularly gullible, breathtakingly cynical or a bit of both?

For those who’d like to watch the video of my conversation with the brilliant and electric Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, it’s now on my Youtube channel.

The piece below about last week’s leadership showdown in the corrupt, crime-ridden, debt-laden, femo-Marxist everything-queered state of Victoria was published in The Weekend Australian.

**

In 2019, I rented a desk in a light-filled studio in Melbourne’s Nicholas Building, a Beaux Arts-inspired heritage landmark and hub for the city’s “creatives”. The studio was sweltering in summer, freezing in winter, and pandemonium in all seasons because right outside our window the Metro Tunnel was taking shape, part of the Andrews-Allan government’s massive signature “Big Build”. Our background symphony was of clanging, drilling, hammering, droning, whining and groaning, even though the authorities had issued everyone noise-cancelling headphones.

Yet despite the din, and the frustrations of getting to work as trucks blocked the footpath, I was thrilled to bear witness as the metro station rose from deep within the excavated pit, heralding a glorious future in a metropolis projected to reach eight million by 2050.

Even during Covid, when ice addicts took up residence in Melbourene’s otherwise shuttered streets, the work bored on.

“Most days,” I gushed in The Age, “the swinging cranes and incessant rumbling of construction feels to me like hope.”

I compared the big-ticket Build to giving birth – hold that thought – with “one stage of labour following the other”.

“For at least the next five years, Melbourne and its regions will be shuddering and heaving, cavities exposed and passageways obstructed, as it strains to pass the (then projected) $70bn watermelon of 119 major road and rail projects.”

So wrote an out, self-identified true believer who could barely conceal her gloating at the cementing of Labor’s status as the natural party of government; bursting with pride about its five-year infrastructure plan. An actual Five-Year Plan!

Now Jacinta Allan is ditched as premier four months out from a state election. The Big Build is welded in the public mind to towering debt and corruption, including criminal and bikie infiltration. As for the gleaming future metropolis? Before Allan’s belated crackdown, youth crime got so bad that some residents in wealthy suburbs targeted with car thefts and home invasions by machete-wielding gangs resorted to employing private security to patrol their streets at night. In the poorer suburbs the victims of youth crime were often themselves only children.

It’s as if Melbourne traded places with Johannesburg, or maybe Glasgow, which pocketed $200m to stage the Commonwealth Games Victoria could no longer afford.

The absurd drama of the week – Allan’s highwire antics, staring down challenger Ben Carroll, before caving in – brought nostalgia for the days when I loved Big Brother, or something like that. When Daniel Andrews boasted at Labor’s state conference about the number of level crossings his government had removed, to dutiful standing ovations from the comrades.

In her parting speech, a defiant Allan declared she was “so goddamn proud” of her record in removing 92 level crossings, finishing the Metro and West Gate tunnels, and working on the North East Link and presently indefensible Suburban Rail Loop.

“The Liberals opposed them,” she said. “Now they’re trying to rewrite history again – by saying they’re tainted, or somehow a waste. Victorians won’t buy that.”

Victorians might indeed have bought only a moderately large cost blowout, a debt burden somewhere shy of the horrendous $200bn projection, and the ordinary amount of corruption that lubricates CFMEU-controlled construction sites, as opposed to the alleged $15bn worth.

As Carroll promises a new dawn of integrity and financial prudence, it’s tempting to note the wild, only-in-Victoria features that helped bring the state to its knees and the government into decline. Take Labor’s obsession with “gender”, to use the politically correct term.

Early on, the government worried that women voters, if not exactly unmoved by hard-infrastructure projects, placed equal weight on the “soft” infrastructure of services – health, education, childcare, domestic violence and so on. Note how even my column in The Age feminised the Big Build with a childbirth metaphor.

So the government set targets to get more women working on public construction projects. It’s a laudable enough aspiration, the whiff of social engineering notwithstanding. (Victorian Labor is staunchly committed to women’s liberation, which has even extended to those uniquely oppressed women trapped inside the male bodies of incarcerated sex offenders desperate to gain entry into women’s prisons.)

One of the sensational revelations uncovered by Nine reporter Nick McKenzie and anti-corruption investigator Geoffrey Watson is that a company called Women in Construction won Big Build contracts despite being owned by a male serial domestic violence abuser and managed by a male convicted drug trafficker, also accused of family violence. On some sites female workers were recruited from strip clubs and performed in the shed during work hours for cash in hand.

Not quite the construction industry job Labor had in mind?

If some of us seem fixated on social policy, it’s because we’ve endured too long under a government fixated on what it sees as progressive social policies even when the evidence proves they’re not working.

Apart from the likely burden on business, Allan’s proposed women-friendly right to work from home two days a week is as intrusive and heavy-handed as Peter Dutton’s dud plan to order public servants back into the office. And probably potentially limiting for women’s career prospects. And arguably off-message because if, as she has claimed, one of WFH’s upsides is reduced traffic congestion, why bother at all with blockbuster road and transport infrastructure? Why not save money by confining workers to Zoom calls in their PJs?

All of the above has been well-rehearsed but it’s hard to convey the spiritual toll of having lived under a government run by good people that nonetheless through the passage of time – 11 years, 245 days, fill in the hours – and an incompetent, cannibalistic opposition gradually wore down the public with zombie spin and brittleness.

Insisting nothing was wrong when clearly a great deal is, which is not to suggest everything’s broken. But. Vacant shopfronts.

Potholes.

There was a point at which even I could no longer cancel out the noise about government mismanagement. When I started inwardly pleading with Ben Carroll to do something already. To channel Chris Minns and Peter Malinauskas, and arrest Victoria’s runaway train of lefty excess.

Carroll at least did something after assuming the education portfolio in October 2023. He eventually slammed the anti-Israel teachers within some branches of the Education Union as “divisive and inflammatory” after they sought to escalate the November 2023 school strike for Palestine into a “Week of Action”. He’s thus far resisted the teachers’ industrial demands, which, without getting into the merits, at least demonstrates he won’t be intimidated by unions. He mandated the teaching of phonics against the objections of “balanced literacy” activists.

So, OK, he never replied to my email in which I complained that my daughter’s high school hadn’t offered VCE English Literature that year and argued Literature should be a “foundational” subject in the public education system. Admittedly, Literature is not really Labor’s thing, phonics or no phonics. Not unless the literary work takes the form of a manifesto crawling with motherhood concepts and weasel words.

Maybe it was pandemic privilege that denied to Allan the same latitude Andrews enjoyed in stonewalling and smearing critics. Or maybe it was sexism – Andrews never had to contend with a brothel owner running a “ditch the witch” campaign, though in fairness he had to contend with campaigns so vicious a man of lesser steel would have crumbled. Either way, it had reached the stage where virtually every word Allan uttered sounded contemptuous, no matter the subject, as if she was speaking to someone – some group – worthier than you of her attention.

Sadly, the tic persisted to her grande finale where she could have rested on her long and impressive record as an MP. Instead, she seemingly played the gender card: “If you’re a woman making your start in politics, let me say this to you. Please don’t look at what I’ve experienced this week and think … I don’t want to be involved.”

Sometimes “female pain”, the very real problem that nonetheless drove her questionable decision to open 20 women’s health clinics, is simply ordinary human pain. On her last day as premier that pain was etched on her face, and it was awful to watch.

Arguably, Carroll was to blame for introducing the woman theme six weeks ago when he pledged he wouldn’t mount a leadership challenge as he was “proud” his daughter would grow up knowing he supported Allan. For patronising cringe-worthiness the statement is hard to top.

Query if a party that treats regime change as an exercise in Orwellian amnesia can really be trusted. Allan attempted to rewrite history in trying to blame Andrews for the debt and crime she “inherited” as premier, forgetting they belonged to the same government. Carroll in turn blamed Allan and Andrews for the party’s current unpopularity, stressing he’s not them.

Maybe Carroll’s white knight manoeuvre schtick has come too late for the damsel in distress that is Victoria. We’ll see.

One last irony: after being a punchline for what seemed like forever, and even as it battles a surging One Nation and mops up after protracted internal brawling, suddenly it’s the Liberal Party exercising good judgment and calm focus, thanks to leader Jess Wilson. A woman. Who seemingly knows how to build things.

For some time now I’ve been keen to speak with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, an anti-Hamas Palestinian nationalist and peace advocate who has a scorching critique of the so-called pro-Palestinian movement in the West. This week I finally got my wish; here, Ahmed talks to me at length about his essay Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages, published this week in The Jewish Quarterly. Ahmed’s piece interrogates how the Islamist terror group took root in Gaza, seized power and stayed in power long enough to execute the October 7 invasion of southern Israel. He dissects Hamas’s strategy of brutalising and indoctrinating ordinary Gazans into the cult of martyrdom so that the jihadists could weaponise civilian deaths to inflame world opinion against Israel.

To understate matters, the strategy proved spectacularly successful.

In the Gaza war, Ahmed himself lost 34 members of his extended family to Israeli airstrikes. His essay is in part memoir — revisiting his childhood in Gaza and the all-too-brief moment of optimism and euphoria in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords.

We talk about the real Gaza as opposed to the symbolic Gaza that animates what Ahmed calls the “pro-Palestine industrial complex”: about the toxic impact of foreign aid on the strip and about the Al Jazeera’ing (who says it’s not a word!) of media discourse on Israel-Gaza. About why the Western liberal-progressive media finds his an inconvenient voice, and how his views on Jews, Israel and Zionism evolved over the years.

His words ought to carry weight here in Australia, given that the Labor Party dumped references to Hamas needing to disarm and play no governing role from its resolution at the weekend's national conference, even though these elements are official Labor government policy.

A few clarifications. At one point I ask Ahmed about the Israeli writer Einat Wilf’s claim that she’s only aware of three Palestinians who are prepared to affirm the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state between the river and the sea. Actually, she said four people rather than three; and obviously she’s referring to people prepared to publicly accept the legitimacy of Israel — I should have made that clear. For Ahmed’s response, have a listen!

At another point I refer to Hasbara: I should have explained that that’s a Hebrew word for Israel’s public diplomacy — and like all things related to Israel it’s assumed a sinister meaning for the political left.

Ahmed is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a US foreign policy think-tank based in Washington, DC., where he leads the project Realign for Palestine.

To buy a copy of Ahmed’s essay, Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages, follow this link: https://jewishquarterly.com

Chetna Mahadik is general manager at the Robert Menzies Institute in Melbourne, a fellow stacker and the editor of, and contributor to, a recently published book of essays, Immigration & Multiculturalism: The Past, The Present and The Future. Chetna’s essay, Racism in Australia: Narrative and Reality, tracks her encounters with the country’s sometimes mystifying debates about its national character. As she explains in the piece, Chetna migrated to Australia from India in 2011 with a master’s degree in globalization and media. At the time Melbourne was experiencing a spate of attacks against Indian international students, with student leaders alleging the violence was part of a broader pattern of anti-Indian racism. Chetna decided she’d write about the controversy — but what she found surprised her.

We talk about her essay and what she learned about “anti-racism” discourse. We talk about the insights she gained from editing the politically-heterodox essay collection, which explores the evolution of Australian immigration policy from the postwar ethos of “populate or perish” through to the dismantling of the White Australia Policy and the adoption of multiculturalism. We talk about the fraught debate around Muslim immigration to the West, and to Australia after the Bondi Beach massacre, the rise of the populist right and Pauline Hanson’s promotion of “monoculturalism.”

A few things of note:

On 21 July the Robert Menzies Institute is holding a public conversation on “Conditions for a Successful Immigration Policy” with Coalition Senator Jonno Duniam. You can book tickets here: https://www.robertmenziesinstitute.org.au/event/jonno-duniam-policy-dialogue/

The essay collection, Immigration & Multiculturalism: The Past, The Present and The Future, is available from the publisher here: https://www.connorcourtpublishing.com.au/Immigration-Multiculturalism-The-Past-the-Present-and-the-Future-edited-by-Chetna-Mahadik_p_681.html

Or on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/Immigration-Multiculturalism-Past-Present-Future/dp/1923568760

Or on Booktopia.

And Chetna’s newsletter, which includes columns first published in the AFR, is here:

Chetna’s Substack

My personal Substack

By Chetna Mahadik

For what seemed like an eternity, we dissenters from the progressive orthodoxy on trans politics or Islamism or race habitually warned mainstream politicians, especially politicians left-of-centre, that if they didn’t take ownership of cultural problems right-wing populists would. And so it has come to pass virtually everywhere, and now even in steady-as-she-goes Australia as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation surges in the polls. But I never imagined Hanson addressing the National Press Club — and quoting the Marxist-feminist icon Germaine Greer.

Hanson noted: “it’s 15 years since Germaine Greer said in a debate about sex and gender that sex is fundamentally tied to the body and that transgender women are not female.

“She argued that undergoing surgery does not make a person female or, to remind viewers of her frequently quoted remark, ‘Just because you lop off your penis and then wear a dress, doesn’t make you a woman.’”

The country has woken up to the absurdity and myriad injustices of trans ideology since the Full Federal Court decision in Giggle v Tickle, affirming the right of a biological male to access a female-only app. It was further jolted when Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner argued males can suffer discrimination on the grounds of “potential pregnancy,” even though the potential of such a thing happening is zero.

Now, Albo and his state Labor counterparts have every right to hitch their political fortunes to the post-sex order. But they shouldn’t delude themselves into believing that the cause in which they’re contemplating political suicide is progressive. Because while the ABC might celebrate, say, the 17 year-old with a double mastectomy as the embodiment of liberation, most of us, at least on this score, are on Team Pauline.

The piece below first ran in The Weekend Australian. It has been lightly edited.

**

Before we tackle Pauline Hanson’s full-scale assault on transgender ideology in her National Press Club address, let’s revisit Anthony Albanese’s most recent comments on the matter. In an interview with the ABC the Prime Minister dismissed questions about the push to restore biological sex at law and preserve women-only spaces as “culture wars”. It was a triggering moment, if you forgive the wokeism, for gender refuseniks. I could hear the choppers again.

Because for years those of us brave or foolish enough to loudly resist the idea that men can metamorphose into women, or vice versa, have been cast by mainstream leaders, especially by Labor ones, as unhinged, obsessive, uncouth, and that’s on a good day. On a bad day, no less than Dan Andrews denounces a bunch of middle-aged lesbians rallying for sex-based rights as Nazi-adjacent. It would be intellectually dishonest of me not to use the term “us” in this context given that three years ago I was sacked as an Age columnist for calling out the paper’s censorship on the trans debate.

Even people who conceded there were legitimate issues to debate – conceded we gender dissidents weren’t in fact barracking for the mass suicide of people alienated from their sexed bodies – still approached it with caution at dinner parties. Of all the worthy causes why get so fixated on this one, they asked. Why not just roll with the non-binary vibe? Spend less time on X? Less time reading The Australian?

There were echoes of the why-die-on-this-hill reprimand when Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody argued in The Australian that some people hold “genuine” concerns about “trans women” (biological males) accessing women’s-only spaces and these views must be engaged with “respectfully”.

She then immediately lamented the debate’s “intensity”. It is a distraction, she says, from the “far more urgent” issue of the 22 women and children murdered this year because of “gendered violence”, meaning at the hands of men though she swerves from the word lest her post-sex schema buckle under the weight of reality.

In other words: “Stop bleating about how sex matters and look at all the women killed because of this thing that doesn’t matter.”

Notice, once again, the attempt to undermine the concerns of critics. They can have their say – sort of. They just shouldn’t get intense. We’ve seen what this means in practice. The full Federal Court awarded aggravated damages against female-only app founder Sall Grover for her “gratuitous” and “disrespectful” conduct in “misgendering” Roxanne Tickle during the trial.

What the authorities deemed “disrespectful” a great many of us regard as nothing but the scientific truth: Tickle is a biological male. Grover, found to have directly discriminated against Tickle when she chose to remove Tickle from the Giggle app, is seeking leave for a High Court appeal.

Now seems a good time to answer head-on Albanese’s charge that the trans debate is a culture war and therefore a distraction from things that really matter. The why-die-on-this-hill question.

The question itself has baked-in sexism. As trans ideology disproportionately affects women, accusing critics of being unhealthily invested is really just a contemporary example of trivialising “women’s issues”. When Peter Malinauskas was questioned last year about the alleged violent sexual assault of a female inmate by a notorious criminal who had identified into a women’s prison, the South Australia Premier charmingly described the policy implications as “niche”.

Decades back it was women’s concerns about high heels or the division of labour within the home that elicited the eye-roll. These days an old-fashioned feminist is labelled a TERF – a trans-activist slur that stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist” – and told to can it.

Moreover, because sex is fundamental to our species, encoded in every cell of our body, its erasure by definition cannot be regarded as a boutique issue. The fatal hill of the zealots’ last stand is really a mountain. Erasing sex in law and policy affects everyone with a stake in women’s sport, everyone who believes female changing rooms should service females only, every parent seeking to protect their child from classroom indoctrination that might lead them to harmful and irreversible medical interventions.

Every normie who would prefer not to inhabit a pseudo-theocracy wherein each administrative interaction, no matter how banal, invokes preferred pronouns, with all their mystical, transcendental connotations. It’s a fair number of people.

The third answer to why-die-on-this-hill is therefore bleeding obvious: the “other side” prosecutes an existential war and refuses to lay down its arms. Refuses to surrender even as the absurd consequences of the Gillard government’s removal of the definitions of “man” and “woman” from the Sex Discrimination Act become spectacularly apparent. Let the record show that as with Islamic State recruits, so too with gender ideology: little Aussie punches above its weight. It is hard to imagine a more potent distraction from the scourge of domestic violence than Cody insisting that biological men can experience discrimination on the grounds of “potential pregnancy”. The clip of her remarks was utterly mesmerising for all the wrong reasons.

Some ideas are so manifestly stupid only the highly educated can grasp them.

The trans-activist catchcry insists that “trans rights are human rights”, and I wholeheartedly agree. Like all humans, people with cross-sex identities are entitled to live free from discrimination; this has never been in issue despite the Orwellian effort to depict sex-realists as small-minded bigots. The real bigots, we might argue, are the politicians and bureaucrats engaged in radical social engineering that invites a backlash against the sexual minorities they’re supposedly defending.

The real bigots are the politicians and bureaucrats who believe universal human rights, including the rights of women and gays, should be sacrificed on the altar of a fiction dressed as utopian virtue but really a version of hell. No point calling “trans rights” a progressive movement if it disenfranchises lesbians from holding public events, condemns gender nonconforming 10-year-olds to be lifelong medical patients and prompts a Labor premier to dismiss the alleged rape of female prisoners under his government’s own regime as “niche”. And compels the acquiescence of the public to all of the above by reframing resistance as “hate” speech.

There is a point at which the accumulation of perverse outcomes in this caper must come to be seen as a feature and not a quirk. Far from “progressive”, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests trans ideology is resoundingly the opposite.

Alas, I reckon Albanese understands all too well that it’s his government engaging in the mother of all culture wars, and risks being accidentally martyred in the cause.

How the left-of-centre political class landed in this predicament, we can only speculate. Odds are that Labor unwittingly allowed its social policy to be hijacked by groups peddling an agenda we can only describe as … niche. I’d be staggered if when he tabled the 2013 legislative amendments to the SDA, attorney-general Mark Dreyfus intended to turn men into women in the eyes of the law.

There is no shame in fessing up to having been ambushed by unforeseeable consequences. As the great philosopher (really!) Ricky Gervais has pointed out, you won’t find a tweet 10 years ago of someone saying, “Women don’t have penises.” “You know why? We didn’t think we f..king had to!”

And so to Pauline Hanson, the talk of the nation. She isn’t the only one suggesting the Giggle fiasco and the whole trans fever-dream has played a role in One Nation’s surge, especially among women.

I’d wager it’s true. Not because ordinary folk in the suburbs have investigated Judith Butler’s theory of “gender as performance” and arrived at the commonsense conclusion that it’s little more than word games gone mad. But because the spectacle of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner and her potentially pregnant men cements the perception that the government and its organs of state are too caught up with policy onanism to attend to prosaic bread-and-butter concerns.

When Hanson declares war, as she did last week, on the transgender “insurgency” she claims is “infecting all of society”, Albanese ought to be on guard. He wouldn’t be the first politician to find themselves wrong-footed on trans. When Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon, already on the nose, dithered about whether a two-time male rapist was a “woman”, her days at the top were numbered. When Kamala Harris pledged during the 2019 presidential campaign for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for undocumented migrants and for prisoners, a killer Republican attack ad was born: “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.”

Unless he moves to fix the mess, “trans” politics might become the mosquito at Albanese’s ear: irritating, distracting and potentially the thing that throws him off balance.

This piece was first published in The Weekend Australian. It has been lightly edited.

**

The latest episode on Australia’s very strange cultural moment features Penny Wong, Mehreen Faruqi, Grace Tame, Charlie Pickering, Avi Yemini and a vast supporting cast. It deals with racism and hypocrisy, rape and lies, truth and propaganda.

Let’s start with parliament on Thursday when Greens senator Faruqi grilled the Foreign Minister about claims from flotilla activists that they were sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers after trying to break the blockade of Gaza.

“Minister, do you believe these women?” Faruqi asked.

Penny Wong said her position was “to always believe women when allegations of sexual assault are made”.

This is an extraordinary statement on many levels. I’ve never gone in for “always believe women”, which seems to me a dangerous leap from the undeniable fact that the justice system has been historically loaded against rape victims. Being complex individuals, women are capable of falsehoods and distortions even on the question of sexual assault.

It’s certainly possible that Israeli forces raped the Australian detainees, even though Israeli authorities strenuously deny the allegations while vowing to investigate any claims brought to them. But the flotilla activists had set sail with the express aim of casting the Israeli state as brutal and the blockade of Gaza unjustified. They were, from the start, gleeful participants in a propaganda stunt, propelled by a narrative of half-truths.

So why did Wong take Faruqi’s bait? Because if she genuinely believes the rape claims, it is a front-page scandal that neither she nor Anthony Albanese has met with the claimants or taken up their cases with Israeli authorities.

Clearly, Wong was reluctant to publicly criticise the flotilla activists. Was she simply resisting Faruqi’s attempt to trap her? Or does she believe the activists are good humanitarian types whose motivations shouldn’t be too closely scrutinised? Even if their claims add to a climate of anti-Jewish hostility?

One of the alleged victims, Julie Lamont, had also said she was sexually assaulted by an Israeli soldier during her previous flotilla expedition last year. I watched her interviewed about her fresh allegations on Double Down News, a left-wing outfit I’d never heard of. Most fascinating was the conduct of the interviewer: while apologising for appearing intrusive, he returned again and again to Lamont’s rape claims, seeking more detail.

I won’t comment on her answers other than to suggest they were both graphic and confusing. My point is that no mainstream “news” report that I’ve read has attempted to grapple with the activists’ allegations in the way this interviewer did.

Certainly not the ABC, in the news for appointing Grace Tame as host of a four-part podcast on autism. It speaks volumes about the broadcaster’s centre of moral gravity that it chose not to dump the former Australian of the Year, a much-lauded campaigner against sexual abuse, but latterly notorious for shrieking “globalise the intifada” at a protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit after the Bondi Beach massacre. And for describing the systematic sexual violence Hamas terrorists inflicted on Israeli women and girls on October 7 as “propaganda” that had been “debunked”, therein spouting pernicious propaganda.

I need hardly elaborate on the hypocrisy here. We know that as an institution the ABC would (rightly) regard incitement – however unconscious – against Indigenous people or Muslims as a deal-breaker. Only when it is Jews in the frame does the ABC become strikingly sensitive to nuance, haughtily parsing the creator from their art.

As the Wong episode in parliament suggests, crusaders for what’s deemed a good cause get a free pass in the current orthodoxy, no matter their recklessness with the truth. Still – I was relieved Tame wasn’t dumped, in the way someone would be relieved to learn they’re only going to be bashed around the head for four hours a day and not six.

I figure our already bruised body politic needs another Gaza-linked cancellation scandal even less than it needs … err … a four-part podcast exploring “what life is like for autistic women and gender-diverse people”, a premise that in itself opens a can of worms.

Another Gaza-linked cancellation scandal at the ABC would be dubbed a sequel to the Antoinette Lattouf controversy and feature the same villain, one Tame has already identified. In March she complained to the ABC about losing paid engagements because of a “smear campaign” sprung from a “propaganda playbook”.

This was a veiled reference to the so-called pro-Israel or Zionist lobby or, in the less-guarded banter of the ABC newsroom – and we know this from the Federal Court judgment in the Lattouf case – the “Jewish lobby”, which coincidentally is also the preferred terminology of neo-Nazi protesters. Dumping Tame would undoubtedly trigger accusations about the victimising of a “diverse” and vulnerable woman, a survivor of sexual abuse, and all to placate a shadowy, uniquely powerful “lobby” determined to suppress the truth about Israel’s “genocide” of Palestinians in Gaza.

Staff in the ABC would likely revolt with the backing of the journalists union. The op-ed pages of the Nine papers and The Guardian would explode with warnings from prestigious writers about democracy under threat. The Australian chapter of Amnesty International might chime in, as it did in Lattouf’s case, anointing Tame another modern-day prisoner of conscience.

In short: the Jews would be blamed. In the logic of antisemitism, the Jews are a malign power subverting from behind the scenes everything that is good and virtuous. Not that I’m worried about Jews getting blamed – that ship sailed way back.

The ABC reportedly appointed Tame before her “globalise the intifada” outburst. If it had done so subsequently, I’d accuse it of trolling the Jewish community and everyone else disinclined to legitimise extremist rhetoric in the public square. As it stands, this is a decision not to do as Tame claims other organisations have since done in cancelling her gigs and speaking engagements. As I’ve said, that’s hypocritical of the ABC – but perhaps defensible. Should the public broadcaster wish to maintain what’s left of its public trust, the content overlords better ensure the autism podcast steers clear of anything Israel. No passing images of Greta Thunberg.

Frankly, the less the ABC is required to play the role of moral arbiter over the talent it platforms or commissions, the better for everyone. It has proven itself distinctly unworthy for the role, to the point where I fear that the organisation – and generally the managerial class that commands institutions across the cultural and academic sectors – has lost whatever capacity it once had for self-critique.

Consider the curious, and depressing, case of Drive host Charlie Pickering. In an interview outside the ABC with Avi Yemini, whom the Nine papers described as a “serial right-wing agitator”, Pickering said the ABC’s appointment of Tame was “problematic” on account of her intifada chant and expressed concerns as a Jewish Australian that activists were ignorant of the true meaning of their slogans.

Yemini alleged the ABC had become infected with groupthink. Pickering disagreed; journalists weren’t hired for their political opinions, he said. While the arguments on both sides missed the point – the problem is less the politics of ABC staff than their apparent belief that reporting is compatible with activism – the exchange was interesting. It was the first time I’d seen an ABC presenter answering questions in good faith about the public broadcaster’s institutional culture.

I’m unlikely to see it again any time soon. For his mild criticisms of Tame’s appointment, Pickering copped lashings of Jew-hatred on social media. He was called a “professional Jew.” A “Zionist” – these days the worst thing an ABC presenter can be called. Boycott him, people said. Some even speculated he was strategically placed inside the ABC by you-know-who.

None of Pickering’s colleagues came to his defence.

Less than 24 hours later he backtracked, effusively praising Tame, expressing regret he’d given Yemini the interview and complaining he’d been reported out of context (he wasn’t). Through his actions he proved the charge that the ABC is a place of ideological rigidity with scarce room for dissent. He inadvertently showed that within his organisation, the one we all pay for, facts are subordinate to pre-packaged assumptions about saints and villains.

David Free is a critic (including for the Nine papers), novelist, and fellow-Stacker. In recent times, David, a non-Jew, has drawn attention for his lucid and brave essays on the anti-Jewish hostility that’s found a place in Australia’s literary scene.

If you haven’t subscribed to his newsletter, you really must, and I suggest you start with this post, which we discuss at length here because in it David basically proves that the “woke”/intersectional/identity politics/regressive left brigade has a Jew problem. He rests his case on the 2018 book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, who he exquisitely calls “the American grievance huckster.” I’m so taken with his theory that I read aloud the incriminating passage in full!

We also yak about Clive James, George Orwell and the vicissitudes of this writing life. Listen, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s the link to David’s Substack:

David Free

"My favourite Australian writer of his generation" - Clive James

Journalists like me who write about indigenous affairs infrequently, and mostly from afar, should do so with humility: the politics are often arcane, the historical legacies complicated and the reality on the ground starkly varied depending on where we’re looking. And the news is not all bad: the national report card on alleviating Aboriginal disadvantage — Closing The Gap — shows targets on pre-school participation and employment are on track.

But when UnHerd asked me to write on the horrific fate of five year-old Kumanjayi Little Baby I felt I couldn’t say no.

In the weeks since the tragedy, The Australian reported on a 12 year-old Aboriginal boy who has been the subject of about 100 notifications relating to neglect, lack of supervision, exposure to repeated domestic violence and parental alcohol abuse.

“By the time he was removed from his family he was endangering his own life with risky behaviour and allegedly committing serious violent criminal offences that are before the courts.”

The paper reports other cases of children living in perilous situations for years while authorities dithered.

“Children reportedly staying in a home with a registered sex offender: no further action. A report of a mother not providing food, clothing, medical needs, and the children leaving the home to scrounge for food: no investigation.”

The harm that stalked Kumanjayi Little Baby’s short life is emblematic of shameful and inexcusable policy failure.

Here is my piece first published in UnHerd.

**

Last month, as Australia commemorated Anzac Day and the disaster at Gallipoli, a very modern tragedy was unfolding in the country’s red centre. Kumanjayi Little Baby, a five-year-old Aboriginal girl, lived in Old Timers Creek, a town camp of nine houses on the outskirts of Alice Springs. She slept in a dilapidated building on a ripped and stained mattress, surrounded by empty bottles of bourbon. She was largely non-verbal and had also been the subject of over a dozen child safety notifications since her infancy — half since mid-March.

It is not known how many of these reports were investigated and if any were substantiated. What we do know is that on Saturday 25 April, the girl vanished. According to the child’s mother, she was put to bed at around 11.30pm that night. She was later seen outside holding the hand of a repeat violent criminal, Jefferson Lewis, an Aboriginal man released from prison six days earlier after serving time for various violent offences. Apparently unwelcome in the community where he’d been ordered to go, he’d washed up in Old Timers and started drinking.

After news broke of the child’s disappearance, hundreds of people joined the search. The nation held its breath. The search turned up Lewis’s shirt, a child’s underwear and a doona cover. Dread set in. Her body was found on 30 April, in a dry river bed a small distance from her home.

The national debate reignited our fraught argument about Aboriginal disadvantage and collective guilt. But more than that, the young girl’s shocking death reveals the political stalemate that has set in around Indigenous policy since the 2023 referendum to enshrine an Indigenous “Voice to Parliament” was voted down. While daily life brings an onslaught of symbolic gestures — land acknowledgments, Aboriginal place names — in far-off spots like Old Timers, desperate children are abandoned to their fate.

As news of Kumanjayi Little Baby’s fate spread, fear turned swiftly to rage. When police found Lewis, later the same day in another town camp, locals had beaten him unconscious (he has since been charged with murder and two other offences that cannot be published under Territory law). After Lewis was transferred to hospital, about 400 angry people rioted outside demanding he be handed over for traditional justice, “payback”. Police and emergency services’ vehicles were attacked. Businesses were damaged and shops looted, according to video evidence later released by the Northern Territory’s police chief. “What you see is criminal behaviour, plain and simple,” he said.

What happened next is instructive. Asked to comment on the public disorder, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reminded the nation that “literally hundreds and hundreds” of people had come together to search for the child. “We want to see the community come together,” he added, “but we certainly understand people’s anger and frustration.” Others agreed. Sean Kelly, a Sydney Morning Herald columnist and former Labor government adviser, reflected favourably on Albanese’s restraint because to immediately condemn the violence would have been “the easiest thing in the world”.

Only, the evidence suggests the opposite is true. For the Prime Minister, and indeed for much of the centre-left, it’s apparently the hardest thing in the world to speak plainly about violence in Aboriginal communities — and how that violence too often endures under cover of preserving Indigenous “culture”. If ever the ritual accusations of the intellectual Left about “systemic racism” in Australia were to land with moral force — accusations that erupt each time an Indigenous person dies in custody or is shot by police — it was surely now.

But political progressives have responded with little more than platitudes that this tragedy be a “turning point” on tackling Indigenous disadvantage. That, and homilies on “centring” the little girl’s family in the fallout as they observe the “sorry business”, the cultural protocols around mourning.

After meeting with Kumanjayi Little Baby’s mother, Malarndirri McCarthy, the federal Labor government’s Indigenous Australians Minister, said she wanted to say that it was clear the child was very loved.

“That is an an important message that has to go out across the country – irrespective of images that you have seen, the images of town camps, I really want to make that fundamentally clear on behalf of the family how loved this little girl was.”

But, alas, deep love and chronic neglect have never been mutually exclusive.

It fell to the political Right to say as much, and none as powerfully as Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price — who is also, as it happens, the dead girl’s aunt. In a searing and desperate speech to Parliament, she described a “hands-off ideology” that meant officials were silent about alcohol abuse, dysfunction and violence in Indigenous communities for fear of being called “racist”.

“But,” Price said, “it’s not racist to speak the truth.”

The truth, in this case, invites profoundly uncomfortable questions. I’ll deal with them in roughly ascending order of sensitivity, starting with how was a violent repeat offender such as Lewis allowed anywhere near children? Do we need tougher sentencing, even though Indigenous people, especially in the Northern Territory, are already cited as the most incarcerated in the world?

What of Old Timers itself, a place so chaotic and dangerous that, even inside her home, Kumanjayi Little Baby was allegedly prey to someone like Lewis? What of the Indigenous-run, taxpayer-funded Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation, responsible for managing and maintaining Old Timers and the other camps around Alice? What to make of revelations that salaries for senior management at the Corporation doubled last financial year to more than $1 million, while residents can’t get front-door locks repaired?

And what of the other town camps, and remote communities more generally, both in the Territory and elsewhere in the country? These camps were established in the 1970s, when discrimination meant Indigenous Australians were prohibited from living in towns; others have since sprung up to accommodate people travelling from remote communities to access services in urban areas.

Around 1,000 people live in the town camps around Alice. Some are reportedly orderly, with residents travelling to and from work. Others, says Price, “can be hell-holes”. “Relics” and “separatist precincts”, says Senator Kerrynne Liddle, also from the centre-right opposition. Should governments keep funding these dysfunctional communities? Mal Brough, a former Indigenous affairs minister in John Howard’s conservative government, thinks they shouldn’t — and regrets his own decision to authorise new housing in remote communities. Though he concedes that much investment has been driven by “genuinely good intentions”, that’s “not enough if the practical outcome is that generations of children grow up exposed to violence, trauma, neglect and hopelessness”.

That leaves perhaps the hardest question of all, the one the Indigenous Australians Minister was presumably attempting to head off when she emphasised how much Kumanjayi Little Baby was loved by her family: should at-risk Indigenous children be removed from their families when they cannot be placed with Indigenous kin or carers? The centre-right Territory government has ordered a review into the child protection department, and announced existing child protection laws will be changed to ensure child safety is “the primary consideration... regardless of background.” This has angered Indigenous advocates because it sparks memories of the so-called “Stolen Generations” — Aboriginal children wrenched from their families under what is widely understood to have been a policy of forced assimilation, and which left a legacy of dislocation and cultural alienation.

Taken together, these policy dilemmas are about the limits of an idea that has been central to progressive ideology since the 1970s: self-determination for the country’s Indigenous people.

**

The push by Australia’s First Peoples to control their own lives came as the nation began to reckon with its racist past, from the frontier massacres of the colonial era to the segregationist policies that forced Indigenous people onto reserves and missions, where they were often exploited as cheap labour. Later, under assimilation policies, many were displaced from their communities — while still facing restrictions on entering towns such as Alice.

But critics argue that the shift to self-governance exacerbated social problems in some regions. Every few years, a scandal like Old Timers pierces through the news cycle to remind the public of the sickening daily violence visited on Aboriginal women and children in some Outback communities — and the impotence of officialdom in stopping it. I’ll spare you the roll call of the children raped, in at least one instance gang raped; the toddler raped so badly she needed a blood transfusion; the women beaten to death, stabbed, repeatedly run over or set on fire, at home or in the street; the inquiries and reports with their findings of systemic failures and their urgent recommendations.

Amid these horrors, a pivotal moment came after a landmark 2007 Northern Territory report entitled “Little Children are Sacred”. It found that the scourge of Indigenous violence was widespread, and driven by cheap grog, poor school attendance and social breakdown. Indigenous leader Noel Pearson was asked on TV whether government intervention would be described as “paternalism”. He famously replied: “Ask the terrified kid huddling in the corner when there is a binge drinking party going on down the hall if they want a bit of paternalism?”

The Howard government declared a national emergency, announcing sweeping top-down measures that would become known as “The Intervention”. This involved a raft of measures, from standardised bans on alcohol and pornography, to income management, law-and-order crackdowns, a scaling up of health and employment programmes, and the temporary suspension of aspects of Indigenous self-governance.

Whether The Intervention was successful is hard to measure. A common view among Indigenous advocates is that whatever the short-term gains, they weren’t enough to outweigh the damage caused from undermining the traditional authority of elders and stripping communities of their sense of agency. Some argued The Intervention’s “emergency” framing — even the army was brought in — was cover for a government agenda of socially engineering what anthropologist Melinda Hinkson, in the introduction to Coercive Reconciliation, an anthology of essays she co-edited with Jon Altman, describes as a “normalised” Aboriginal population, “one whose concerns with custom, kin and land will give way to the individualistic aspirations of private home ownership, career and self-improvement”. Critics claim that the “No Pornography” signs at the communities’ entrances were themselves enough to create a debilitating legacy of “shame”.

“Shame” is a word frequently used by progressives in the Indigenous debate, as is “intergenerational trauma” in relation to past wrongs stemming from colonisation. Conservatives usually answer with concrete nouns: things like “welfare” and “grog”.

And so it is now. Following Kumanjayi Little Baby’s death, conservatives renewed their calls for federal audits of Indigenous corporations running remote communities, for national inquiries into sexual abuse and violence in Indigenous communities, for bold action. Progressives called for more government funding and resisted calls for better oversight. Governments, said the National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People, Sue-Ann Hunter, needed to focus not on punitive crackdowns but on “services designed by us, delivered by us and trusted by us”.

More frustrating still is that these debates are increasingly engulfed in meta-debates about the moral legitimacy of Australia — and indeed Western civilisation more generally. It sometimes feels like extreme voices are all we hear, whether that’s the hard Left re-badging Australia Day as “Invasion Day”, decrying Australia as a “settler-colonial regime”, and peddling myths of the “noble savage”; or else the chauvinistic Right booing Indigenous elders during traditional “Welcome to Country” ceremonies at the Anzac Day dawn services — an ugly spectacle that happened last month for the second year running. Both sap the body politic of the energy and goodwill needed to fix systemic problems.

But a precondition to fixing systemic problems is naming them. On the night the 2023 referendum was defeated, Anthony Albanese promised he would keep working to improve outcomes in Indigenous communities and towards reconciliation. As he told Indigenous Australians: “Maintain your hope and know that you are loved.” But Kumanjayi Little Baby, as we know, had plenty of love. What she needed, what she lacked, was protection.

Since a version of this piece was published in The Weekend Australian the circus of the Gaza-bound protest flotilla kicks on, and on. Perhaps you’ve seen the viral footage of Basque police giving flotilla activists an inhospitable welcome on their return to Spain from detention in Israel. The cops dragged protestors across the floor and wielded batons with considerable enthusiasm. In an amusing development — amusing in the post October 7, when-can-I-wake-up-from-this-nightmare sense of the word — the Israeli embassy in Spain has demanded an “explanation” from the Spanish government over the events at Bilbao airport. Spain being among the countries leading the global anti-Israel charge.

Meanwhile flotilla activists, including returned Australians, have fresh allegations of mistreatment at the hands of Israeli authorities. “I was dragged into a darkened container ship on a prison boat, I was sexually assaulted, I was beaten, and that was just the beginning of four days of absolute hell,” said one. Another claims to have suffered a fractured cheekbone, rib and a pulmonary abrasion. Another a punctured lung. One protestor who spoke to the media at the airport in Turkey had a black eye.

The more sensational allegations sound like all the other sensational, and ultimately false, allegations of which Israel is accused in conducting its terrible wars against heinous enemies. Still, Israeli authorities should investigate all claims of abuse. And the corruption of the state’s security apparatus under far-right minister Itamar Ben Gvir is a clear and present danger to Israeli democracy.

I have no trouble reconciling my disgust — and fear — of Ben Gvir and his foot soldiers with my contempt for the (at best) jihadi-adjacent flotilla activists. The activists who arrived in Turkey were filmed singing Bella ciao, the anti-Nazi Italian partisan anthem. The irony, and blatant Holocaust inversion, may or may not be lost on them. Either way, we’ve reached the limits of my amusement.

Here’s the piece, lightly edited.

The distasteful footage of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, humiliating detained activists on the Gaza-bound flotilla as they’re kneeling, wrists zip-tied behind their backs and noses to the floor, and the wave of international condemnation in response to the footage, has the feel of performance art. This is art emblematic of the increasingly warped dynamic between Israel and much of the Western world.

In a video clip Ben-Gvir himself proudly uploaded to social media, he and his hand-picked goons, are seen storming the installation where Israel had detained, pending deportation, several hundred of the 430 activists from the latest Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla. Israeli flag in hand, national anthem blaring from loudspeakers, he taunts the prostrated detainees. One woman stands up to shout “Free Palestine” and is shoved to the ground, headfirst, by security personnel.

“Welcome to Israel,” Ben-Gvir declares, ruddy with excitement. “We are the landlords,” he proclaims – to the unabashed satisfaction of the “Zionism Equals Colonialism” crowd. Israel-haters were pointing out that if the state so openly humiliates Westerners, imagine what torture it metes out to Palestinian prisoners when no-one’s filming.

But we don’t need to imagine it: The New York Times’ columnist, Nicholas Kristof, has filled in the blanks with lurid, and unsupportable, allegations that Israeli authorities have trained dogs to rape Palestinians detainees. Much like contemporary art, journalism these days is nothing if it doesn’t shock.

All of which is a bounty for the likes of Ben-Gvir. In the clip, he’s clearly revelling in his deservedly malign overseas reputation, hamming it up. Because the more Israel is isolated and sanctioned abroad – the more its contestants are booed at Eurovision – the stronger the appeal at home for Ben-Gvir’s brand of chauvinistic messianism on the religious fringe.

Even his boss was forced into a defensive crouch. Benjamin Netanyahu said that although Israel has every right to stop “provocative flotillas of Hamas terrorist supporters”, his minister’s conduct was “not in line with Israel’s values and norms”.

The statement doesn’t cut it. While it’s true that Ben-Gvir’s “values” are out of line with those of mainstream Israel, he’s been able to distort the state’s “norms”, corrupting parts of the security apparatus to enable violent settlers on the West Bank.

Israel must cut off the atrophying limb of its fascist far right before it irreversibly poisons the nation’s democratic health.

But Israel’s problems aren’t the only ones in the frame here.

The flotillas carrying their meagre payloads of “symbolic” aid are publicity stunts designed to stoke anger at Israel’s two-decade naval blockade of Gaza. Unpleasant and scary as it must have been for the detainees on the receiving end of Ben-Gvir’s thuggishness, from their point of view it was surely mission accomplished: publicity gold.

“I’ve been kidnapped for the second time by an increasingly desperate Israel,” reads the headline on an op-ed in The Age/Sydney Morning Herald from Neve O’Connor, one of the 11 Australian activists detained in Israel last week. (None of the Australians were present at the Ben-Gvir incident.) She was similarly detained on a separate attempt to reach Gaza on April 29 before being released. The papers’ editors thought it safe to imply that she would again characterise her present experience as a “kidnapping”.

Let’s flag here that the flotilla activists are not exclusively, or even mostly, comprised of good, if somewhat intellectually blinkered, people. Several of its leaders are sanctioned by the US for their alleged links to Hamas, and other extremist front groups. The movement is best described as an Islamo-Marxist endeavour in which Che Guevara meets Hassan Nasrallah.

I can understand world leaders’ strenuous protests at the mistreatment of their nationals: Penny Wong said the Ben-Gvir video was “shocking and unacceptable”. I can understand – even if the fury seems over the top. US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee accused Ben-Gvir of having “betrayed the dignity of his nation”. I’m tempted to retort that at least Israel still had some dignity left to betray, as opposed to the emphatic degradation of America and its once great institutions under the Trump administration. (The commando-style ICE raids, the children caged at the border.) But, fine.

What’s not fine is this week’s straight news reports noting that Hamas joined in the global chorus of condemnation. The terror group called out Ben-Gvir for the “scenes of abuse and humiliation” of the activists, saying they show Israel’s “moral decadence and sadism”. Just a little surreal, that.

Hamas’s (truly) sadistic reels from October 7, including its systematic sexual violence – “moral decadence”, by any measure – are documented in the recently released 300-page report of Israel’s civil commission.

I would have liked Wong to comment on the civil commission’s October 7 report. To rebuke the taxpayer-funded writers and intellectuals who’ve led a systematic campaign to cast doubt on the October 7 rapes. She was last week asked by the ABC whether Australia believes Israel’s Gaza blockade is appropriate. She should have reminded us that the measure is a response to Hamas’s unending racist crusade against the Jewish state.

But she said nothing.

Because in this obsessive morality play, with Israel at its centre, everyone – not just the vile Ben-Gvir – plays their part.

Late last week I was asked if I could take part in a panel discussion on Sunday morning, a fringe event to be held at the Labor Party’s Victorian State Conference. The event, organised by Labor Friends of Israel, would discuss antisemitism in Australia — and kick off at 10am.

The head said no: 10am on a Sunday for Chrissakes! As it is, you’re exhausted. And what of your endless to-do list, the book proposal still unwritten, the fridge stripped bare, the two weeks’ worth of unanswered emails. (Bear with me, dear readers — I’ll reply to all of you soon.)

The heart said yes: think of all the people fighting the good fight within the party. The party you once loved, ferociously. And be honest: part of you is feeling tender and nostalgic, maybe even a little thrilled, to be invited to an event at a Labor state conference. Fringe though the event is. Very fringe.

Obviously the heart won or you wouldn’t be reading this.

**

The panel discussion unfolded before an audience of around 10 people, in a studio up a flight of stairs. Earlier that morning, I was told, a comprehensive motion on antisemitism had passed with the resounding support of the left and right factions. All the conference delegates had stood to applaud. Maybe because of this the atmosphere in this small room felt safe, even cosy. At one point, about half a dozen people walked in, all faces I hadn’t seen before. Later, one of the newcomers, a man, stood up.

“I’m Iranian,” he said — and immediately, I relaxed.

We should focus on the root of the problem, he said. The problem is the Iranian regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They’re the ones behind the eruption in Jew-hatred. We nodded along with him. But he is frustrated, he said, because the Iranian monarch in exile has thrown his lot in with Benjamin Netanyahu and this is causing division within the Iranian resistance abroad. The man said he and his colleagues don’t want a return to monarchy in Iran, they want a parliamentary democracy. He sat down. For a moment I was lost in thought, deflated at this account of tensions within the Iranian diaspora.

We tried to end the session on a hopeful note. Thankfully there was a rabbi on the panel, and rabbis rarely have trouble finding hopeful things to say. Actually, I was feeling a little hopeful too, a little buoyed thanks to the Iranians, who were now coming up and shaking my hand and expressing solidarity in the struggle against Jew-hate.

In fact, as I descended the flight of stairs to the main foyer where the formal proceedings were taking place I was feeling so hopeful that I figured I’d hang around for a bit. It was the second and last day of the conference — the day earlier, the Premier and Prime Minister had been there, revving the faithful.

For the blissfully uninitiated, state conference is where delegates from local branches and unions, MPs and factional operators, wheel and deal and vote on internal matters. A highlight, at least for the media, is the policy debates, which usually expose the ideological rift between the Labor rank-and-file and its parliamentary representatives. Invariably the party members indulge their unhealthy fixation on foreign policy, with the most enduringly unhealthy fixation of all being .. oh, go on, guess!

My friend Adam Slonim, a co-convenor of Jewish Labor, a grouping in the party, told me he’d be proposing a motion calling for “respectful conduct” in party discussions of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The subtext being that these discussions happen in the party all the flaming time. Two years ago the conference had degenerated into a Jew-hating free-for-all with one delegate told to “sit down Zionist” and called a “mutt.” Hopefully things wouldn’t get as ugly this time. And if they did, what journalist could resist bearing witness to their own evisceration?

I headed for the coffee stand, past the stalls promoting the obsessions of Labor’s activist base. Defend the ABC. Scrap AUKUS. End duck shooting.

A poster of Julia Gillard advertised a silent auction of a signed copy of her misogyny speech — and as if on cue, I ran into a TERFy woman I’d met on the sex-realist protest scene, where we sex-realists protest the Gillard government’s 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act, which removed the terms “man” and “woman” and added the mystical category of “gender identity.” We TERFs are reeling in the wake of this month’s full Federal Court decision in Giggle v Tickle that established the rights of biological males identifying as women to access women’s-only spaces.

(TERF, again for the blissfully ignorant, is a slur that women who believe in the immutable reality of biological sex have reclaimed as a badge of honour. If you’re unfamiliar with the acronym just look it up.)

The TERFy woman looked around furtively. She pulled from her bag a flyer advocating for sex-based rights. She explained that she and another TERF had gone about discretely handing out the flyers, until security confiscated them for being “unauthorised.”

She said she and the other TERF had managed to engage some conference delegates in debate.

She leaned in conspiratorially. “We have allies,” she half-whispered.

**

I bought a takeaway coffee and almond croissant and planted myself in the “Observers” section of the auditorium. In the row behind me sat three clean-cut looking young men tapping on their laptops. A large screen displayed the text of proposed motions.

The last of the health motions was being debated. A man was speaking in favour of “a health-based approach to cannabis reform,” and said it’s hardly a big deal to have people with the munchies walking around the CBD on the weekend.

Next came a series of worthy proposals: “keeping VicHealth independent,” “providing safe care to Victoria’s most vulnerable NDIS participants in shared accommodation,” and “strengthening Victoria’s mental health system.”

Some part of me surely knew this was as good — as sane — as things were going to get.

Because now it was time for debate on the urgency motions on the Middle East. For Labor party delegates in Melbourne, Australia, the Middle East was a matter of great urgency.

**

Adam Slonim proposed his motion for respectful conduct in the discussion of Israel-Palestine. We must resist, he said, the language of a conflict overseas being imported here, “with notions of the righteous and the damned.” We must resist the “poison” of tribalism.

A decent applause. The motion was seconded. A young man of colour, a Muslim, also rose to speak in support of the motion for respectful debate. He spoke with assurance, his voice lighting up the room. He said that when his family first arrived in Australia in the 1990s, his father got a job at a factory. His father being a religious man, during the break he would pray the evening prayer — to the displeasure of his supervisor who said that if he wanted to pray he needed to do that at home. His father took the matter up with the factory manager.

“And it turns out,” the young man explained, “that his manager was a Jewish person, and he said to him, ‘Mohammed, they chased my grandparents out of Europe because of what we believe. I’m sure as hell .. not going to allow them to restrict you from practising your religion’.”

I felt a rush of gratitude for the young man’s generosity. The delegates leapt to their feet for a standing ovation. As the delegates kept clapping, my gratitude turned to slight discomfort. Slonim had been speaking about antisemitism and this young man responded with a parable of the good Jew standing against ..what? “Islamophobia?” And in truth, I’m uncomfortable about overt displays of religiosity in the workplace — I’m sort of with the factory supervisor on this one.

And I wondered: did the delegates — did I? — see this young Muslim man as brave for his outspoken support of Slonim’s modest call for respectful debate on Israel-Palestine?

A delegate sought to amend Slonim’s motion by inserting the term “anti-Palestinian racism” after a reference to “antisemitism”. The amended motion passed easily.

**

“Comrades..”

**

A delegate from a leftwing union approached the lectern wearing a keffiyeh to speak in favour of a motion “opposing apartheid, unlawful detention and torture in Palestine,” though what he meant by “in Palestine” was unclear. He spoke of a “man-made famine in Palestine,” and referenced the recent detention of the Gaza Flotilla activists. Today being Slonim’s day of abject masochism, he argued the motion was wrong (“apartheid” was more than merely prejudice, it was codified racism, whereas in Israel an Arab judge can send the president to prison) and selective in its morality, all the while stressing he was against the occupation and attuned to Palestinian suffering, remarks that did not earn him rapturous applause from the floor.

The motion easily passed.

Concurrent with the motion was another one calling — calling here, from Melbourne Park — for the release of Palestinian Marwan Barghouti from jail in Israel. Barghouti is serving five life sentences for his role in planning and directing terror attacks against Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada. But hard leftists believe Barghouti was stitched up and see him as a Palestinian Nelson Mandela. Another delegate from a leftist union got up to praise Barghouti as a “unifying figure” who crosses the Hamas-Fatah divide. He also noted that Barghouti speaks Hebrew, and has been in conversation with Israelis “across the board.”

I thought of the perfect Hebrew of Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7.

The delegate said “Marwan Barghouti,” in a way that suggested he enjoyed the sound of the name on his tongue.

When the time came to vote on the Barghouti motion only one brave soul cried, “No.”

**

I gnawed at my now soggy almond croissant. It occurred to me that although my mood had turned glum, the anti-Israel motions hadn’t raised my blood pressure in the slightest. Maybe if “sit down Zionist” is your starting expectation then its absence can seem like civility. Maybe I’d grown so used to the background noise of lies and malicious distortions against the Jewish state that it was becoming hard to get worked up about them.

**

But the Middle East motions weren’t over yet.

**

Now two delegates, men, were proposing a motion opposing the “US and Israel’s wars of aggression against Iran and Lebanon.”

“The problem we have here is also that within 24 hours, the Australian government, our Labor government, gave public support to the US war against Iran,” one of the men said. “This support was a clear breach of our own party’s national constitution, which commits to supporting the rights of all nations to self-determination and to resolve conflicts through the United Nations.”

Some time goes by before the speaker acknowledges that of course we must support Iranians in their struggle for democratic change and human rights. But freedom, he said, cannot be won with cruise missiles raining down on people. It is always “working class people” who pay the cost for war, the man said. Working class people in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine.

Applause. The three clean-cut young men behind me looked up from their laptops to join in the applause.

My jaw clenched.

A young woman stood up to propose an amendment.

“You can’t mention Iran and not acknowledge the victims of the terrorist, brutal regime,” she said. I recognised her as one of the Iranians who’d approached me after the panel to express solidarity.

Her voice was hoarse with emotion. A murmur went through the room.

“You can’t mention Iran and not mention the state-sanctioned massacre of 40,000 Iranians that were killed in two days in January of this year.”

You can’t not mention, she said, the prisoners awaiting execution, the Kurds and Baha’is and women targeted by the regime. The doctors and nurses targeted for treating injured protestors. The systematic rapes.. removal of wombs ..

You can’t mention Iran and not mention any of this, she said again and again — to cheers from delegates. People sprang to their feet.

She proposed an amendment, strongly condemning the Iranian regime “for its egregious human rights violations” and calling for “an immediate halt to all executions and the release of political prisoners.”

The amendment was opposed.

From the observers’ bay, I joined in the cries of “shame.”

Another young woman took the microphone.

“I’m a proud Iranian woman,” she began, “a proud unionist.”

“I am rising here today to speak against the amendment, but not because of its content.

“This motion has no intention of denying what we know to be true, which is that the IRGC is a terrorist organisation that commits atrocities against innocent people of Iran, and that the execution of political prisoners needs to end, and I don’t disagree. This haunts me like it does every other Iranian, but I want to be clear: the West are not our saviours.”

“History shows that Iranian people will not be liberated by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s illegal war”.

Loud cheering from the floor.

“My people’s liberation will come from their own hands … and it is an insult to them to assume that it will be the West who saves us.”

The first Iranian woman rose to her feet a second time.

She again implored the delegates: “You cannot talk about Iran without recognising the oppression and brutality of the regime.

“Why is it even controversial to have this in the motion?

“The Iranian regime cannot emerge as a victim here.”

**

The vote on the amendment was called. Those in favour? A healthy “aye” rang through the room. Those against? A sharp, resounding “No.”

What?

People were voting “no” to ending the executions and releasing the dissidents?

The vote had to be done again “on the cards,” by holding up the laminated card that dangled from a lanyard around everyone’s neck. Again, the votes “for” the amendment were respectable. Thank goodness for that. Thank goodness that a healthy minority of members of the Australian Labor Party, one of the greatest social democratic parties in the world, was still willing to back a call to end executions and release political dissidents in the violent, racist theocracy of Iran.

Those against?

The hands shot up in unison, brandishing their cards like weapons.

**

It was only on leaving the conference auditorium that I realised I was shaking all over, and fighting back tears.

What the hell just happened?

Maybe, I thought, maybe I was overreacting, missing the nuances — maybe I was just a babe in the woods when it came to state Labor conferences and their unsentimental machinations.

I walked up to one of the Jewish Labor types. I told him I found the Iran voting deeply upsetting. He shook his head in agreement.

“That was a shocker,” he said.

I fell into step beside someone who had been at my panel that morning, the panel that now seemed like it had happened years ago. He also agreed that the Iran vote was “a disgrace.” He was walking beside another man with wiry grey hair. The man with wiry grey hair said the motion was the product of badly handled negotiations between Labor factions.

“You know, people just want bragging rights.”

I walked round the foyer trying to find the Iranian woman who had expressed her solidarity for my struggle against Jew-hatred. I was desperate to tell her that I was shocked and outraged at what had just happened. To tell her how sorry I was that people couldn’t set aside their anti-American and anti-Israel biases to express meaningful solidarity with Iranians fighting for freedom. To tell her how distressed I was that people could call for the release of a convicted terrorist like Barghouti but not for the release of courageous women and men standing up to the butchers of Tehran. To tell her of my disgust at a party that can re-engineer society to affirm men who want to be women but can’t demand the liberation of women from the misogynist grip of the mullahs.

I wanted to tell her that on behalf of the Australian Labor Party of which I wasn’t even a member, I was deeply ashamed of all that had just transpired.

But I could not find her, or any of the other Iranians from that morning, so there was nothing left to do but flee state conference.

Some people have described this piece, a lightly-edited version of one published in The Weekend Australian, as a pessimistic take on the first week of public hearings at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which the Government set up under pressure after the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre. And look, I’m pessimistic by nature, it’s why I’m ultimately not an unhappy person — when things turn out well it’s strictly a bonus.

My sense is there’s an implicit assumption framing the commission’s proceedings, namely that Israel is guilty, that Australians of “goodwill” are right to feel revulsion at its conduct and that for the most part this is the nature of the anti-Israel “criticism” we’re seeing today. Each of these assumptions is infinitely contestable.

It’s early days so let’s see how things shake out. In the meantime, the revelations coming out of the commission are deeply shocking — and this alone proves why the inquiry is needed. Without documenting the contagion of Jew-hatred we have zero hope of charting a course back to a healthier society for all.

Here’s the piece.

**

Before airing my slight unease about the framing and the direction of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion – there was always going to be some unease – I’ll tell you why listening to the first week of public hearings felt weirdly disorienting, in a good way.

The stories, of course, were awful and shocking even for me, immersed as I’ve been for the past two-and-a-half years in the escalating Jew-hatred that has dramatically recast our society and much of the West.

A firefighter pulled a hunting knife on a Jewish paramedic, threatening to “skin him”; parents complained to a public school teacher in Tasmania about their kids being forced to learn about the Holocaust because the historical fact of Jewish victimhood apparently enraged them; hospital staff called a Jewish nurse “Zionist scum”; school principals were seemingly indifferent to the cult of Hitler worship among their students. Racist bullies are so self-aware these days, taunting their 13-year-old classmate with the phrase “glass the juice”. Get it? Just some harmless wordplay before they drag the boy across the floor and shove him in the rubbish bin.

Time and again the witnesses told of their ancestors, Holocaust survivors, who fled Europe for Australia’s peaceful shores. Told of how much they love – loved? – this country but are no longer certain of their future here. How Jewish schools are now so heavily fortified they resemble “prisons”.

The “lived experience” witnesses testified in a spirit of pain and defiance, and were received with extraordinary tenderness. And it’s the latter that I found weirdly disorienting: Commissioner Virginia Bell and her assistants’ palpable effort to create an empathetic environment, devoid of judgment. At times the counsel assisting seemed to be holding back tears.

The hearings brought home the uncomfortable realisation that I, and doubtless many other Jews, had become accustomed to pleading our case against an undercurrent of ambient hostility. Such as the relentless accusations from the so-called intelligentsia that we uniquely powerful Jews are exaggerating and “weaponising” Jew-hatred so as to suppress “criticism” of Israel. That we’re narcissistically more upset about protest slogans and people tearing down hostage photos than with the destruction of Gaza. I no longer flinch at those laughing emojis that swarm social media posts about Jewish suffering.

I’m almost desensitised to the spectacle of sober and principled commentators wondering aloud if the Adass Israel Synagogue firebombing was a false flag operation after all.

In fact, I felt a perverse satisfaction when on Wednesday a low-life turned up outside the royal commission hearing in a T-shirt that featured a blue-and-white swastika with a Star of David at the centre and words to the effect of, “proud to be accused of antisemitism”. “See,” I yelled into the imaginary abyss. “See – Jew-hatred is real.”

It was a relief even to hear the royal commission lawyers’ repeated references to the October 7 “Hamas invasion of Israel”. (Hamas – that word started dropping out of circulation among cultural elites from around October 8.) Finally I can experience “cultural safety”, be the subject of “radical listening”. After Antoinette Lattouf’s illegal sacking, managers at the ABC promised they would hold “radical listening” — or was it “deep listening”? — sessions with staff of “diverse” backgrounds. Although it has never been clear whether the public broadcaster’s idea of “diversity” includes Jews.

Let’s talk, then, about the ABC, and The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, because they were frequently spoken of at the hearings. More than one witness accused these outlets of biased reporting that has contributed to a climate of anti-Jewish hatred.

As it happens, I noted an interesting detail in The Herald/Age’s reporting on the evidence of one witness. The witness, the father I mentioned earlier, whose son was dragged along the floor by his classmates, asserted his view that the “new form of antisemitism” is “antizionism”.

“I understand antizionism as a hate movement that spreads the libel that Israel is a coloniser, apartheid and genocidal,” he said. “I’m worried that my friends think that I’m supporting a genocide. But I know Israel is not doing that. They’re just struggling to survive.”

At this point the reporter inserted what they obviously regarded as necessary context: “In September, the world’s largest academic group of genocide scholars resolved that the legal criteria had been met to establish that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.” The report added that Israel’s foreign ministry said the finding was “entirely based on Hamas’ campaign of lies”. However, it omitted the more pertinent fact that more than 500 genocide scholars signed a letter objecting to the resolution and demanding its immediate retraction.

Here we come to the source of my unease about the inquiry, or, really, my confusion about what precisely is being inquired into.

In his opening remarks, Richard Lancaster SC, the counsel assisting the commission, said: “One aspect of the inquiry into modern antisemitism is to identify when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism.” He then goes on to discuss the need to identify when “criticism” of the “polarising” actions of the Israeli government might cross a line into targeting Jews, and Zionists, generally.

So are we talking about “criticism” of Israel or criticism of Israel’s very existence, otherwise known as antizionism, a banner under which many a Jew killer, including the alleged gunman at Bondi, purports to act? If it’s the latter then there is no “line” to cross – the idea has violent racism baked into it.

Commissioner Bell went to the heart of the tension in her question to Jewish community leader Jeremy Leibler. Did he accept, she asked, that there was a “difficult line” between delegitimising Israel and “the views that may be conscientiously held by non-Jewish Australians of goodwill, who are trenchantly critical of actions of Israel, even against the Hamas attack”?

Leibler replied: “I don’t believe that it is difficult to draw the line. I believe that there are many that have an agenda to make it very difficult, in order to blur the lines.”

Commissioner Bell’s people of goodwill “trenchantly” critical of Israel’s actions – and plenty such people exist – ultimately marched under the banner of a movement of ill-will, a fascist movement, and chose to remain incurious about its nature. And these are the same people who would never march under the banner of a “white” fascistic movement.

The Gaza war, lest this needs saying, was horrible and imperfectly prosecuted. (Show me an existential war that is perfectly prosecuted?) It was a war in which Israel was forced to fight a fanatical enemy whose chief weapon was its willingness to sacrifice tens of thousands of its own civilians.

But from the beginning this war was framed by the intellectuals of the West as a genocide because in their world view Israel is from birth an illegitimate genocidal, “settler colonial” regime.

This creed has wormed its way into the mainstream of academia, the human rights sector, the arts and parts of the media, and to the street where the mobs believe it is right to chant “Globalise the intifada,” and Sydney’s lord mayor was more than happy to host a discussion to that effect until, she claims, reporting in this masthead sowed too much fear and misunderstanding, so she pulled the pin.

This war sprouted an entire taxonomy around what it is framed the singular evil of Zionism and its “genocide” in Gaza: ecocide (the deliberate destruction of the environment), scholasticide (the deliberate destruction of educational infrastructure) and aestheticide (the destruction of Palestinian collective sensibility). An Al Jazeera columnist this week argued that the “fancy” new restaurants popping up in Gaza “reveal a new genocidal reality”.

If the “genocide” charge is indeed the outcome of a process of careful deliberation by neutral inquisitors, it conveniently does a lot of heavy lifting. It cancels out the Iranian Axis’s own genocidal campaign against the Jewish state, retroactively obliterates the moral justification for Israel’s creation from the ashes of the Holocaust, and paves the rhetorical path for its elimination. What a coincidence.

So the problem as I see it is that there remains precious little “criticism” of Israel because those seeking to delegitimise the Jewish state long ago drowned out the principled voices of moderation. Call it the Hamasification of our society while we were sleeping.

I sense a view forming in the commission that Jews are indeed being unjustly “conflated” with the decisions of the Netanyahu government – antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal even went as far as describing this conflation as a new category of antisemitism, alongside that of far-left, far-right and Islamist. (Is your head hurting? Mine too.)

The commission, I suspect, will seek to avoid taking a position one way or another on the G-word. I can live with that. And I’d like to think that in simply documenting the scale of Jew-hatred in Australia, the inquiry might succeed in reversing its more brazen and venomous manifestations.

But if the decisions of the Netanyahu government, however contestable, continue to be widely mischaracterised as “genocide”, it’s hard to see Australian Jews being free to express their affinity with the Jewish state without being stigmatised for it. And in that case the charge that “Zionists” are complicit in “baby killing” will continue to narrow the horizons of young Jews, even when they’re not being shot on the beach.

Let’s imagine a hypothetical parent whose child attends a hypothetical public school in Victoria, the Australian state with a global reputation for its unyielding adoption of trans ideology.

This parent, say a mother, is jolted when a recent email from the school’s principal — a routine email written in the typically passive bureaucratese — features, in the principal’s signature down the bottom, preferred pronouns.

Let’s imagine this hypothetical school principal has a name that is unambiguously feminine and is herself unambiguously female. Such a principal nonetheless apparently thinks it necessary to inform the parent body that she chooses to identify with the immutable fact of her female sex.

Except no, that’s not really what she is saying, or at least it’s not the only thing she is saying or signalling with this inclusion of preferred pronouns in her signature. No, she is also saying — and indeed signalling — her endorsement of a newfangled notion in the history of humanity that deems biological sex not immutable, but rather on a spectrum, changeable and able to be customised and overwritten according to individual preference. Even according to a choice of words at the bottom of an email signature when, as in the case of this hypothetical principal, a missive of soul-deadening bureaucratese ends with a mystical incantation on the supernatural potential of the human animal.

And let’s imagine that on reading the email, the email with the principal’s preferred pronouns at the end, our hypothetical mother Loses Her Shit. Even though the mother’s child, let’s say a daughter, responds with her signature eye-roll, telling her mother to get a life.

“It’s really no big deal,” the daughter groans.

Perhaps this hypothetical daughter has a point?

Melting down over preferred pronouns in a principal’s email signature can seem an unacceptable indulgence when considering everything else going on in the world. Everything else going on in the world can make an email signature seem terribly trivial. Trivial, even, in the context of the vast annals of sex-denialist ideology as it kicks on with vigour here, down-under, each passing week bringing a fresh dump of the absurd and the downright evil, from revelations about violent male offenders set loose in women’s prisons to the attempted erasure of lesbians by the organs of the state.

But even if we concede that this hypothetical mother is inclined to overreact to trivial matters, let’s try to imagine her sense of disorientation when, soon after receiving the hypothetical principal’s email, the mother attends an afternoon of parent-teacher meetings at her hypothetical daughter’s hypothetical high school. A school where, hypothetically speaking, at the entrance the Pride flag — as in, the contemporary version that includes the “Pluses,” the boutique sexual and “gender” orientations — flaps alongside the indigenous and Australian flags. A school where “LGBTQIA+” lanyards dangle from the necks of teachers, and where a noticeboard offers helpful instruction on the full spectrum of rainbow identities, from the decidedly old hat Gay and Lesbian to Trans, Non-Binary, Pansexual, Asexual and Aromantic.

Let’s try to imagine how this hypothetical mother might struggle with the idea that a school noticeboard would casually instruct students that for some among them the purest expression of their abiding authentic selves is “asexual” or “aromantic.” And that adults and parents must affirm, nay celebrate, their children’s asexuality or aromanticism, the latter, incidentally, defined as an orientation in which a person experiences “little to no romantic attraction.” I’m guessing that if an aromantic has a sex life at all — assuming their aromanticism is not co-morbid with asexuality — it is so random and mechanistic that their partners would find more warmth fornicating with an actual robot.

And yet here, in this hypothetical Victorian high school, the noticeboard, with all its institutional authority, insists we must rejoice in the event that our child reveals themselves to be thus romantically impaired — a psychopath by any other name? — and implicitly warns us against encouraging such a child to at least consider the possibility that despite their profound orientation against love, love is a force worth striving for and worth cultivating.

Perhaps the hypothetical mother also wonders why the school must urge upon their students relentless self-obsession and ceaseless gazing south of the navel? Where on the school noticeboard, she hypothetically wonders, is the imploring of students towards volunteer work or scouts, or anything outside of themselves and their apparently delightful incongruence of mind, body and spirit?

And so imagine the dissonance experienced by our hypothetical mother on this day as she sits opposite her hypothetical daughter’s hypothetical teachers, listening as they discuss her daughter’s academic progress — her progress in the pure sciences! — while painfully aware that the education system, the system Victorians have no choice but to entrust with teaching their children the essential facts and truths about the world, this system is basically telling children that biological sex is nothing, that they can, and perhaps should, identify out of their awkward teenage bodies. Even if that means taking puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones so as to irreversibly align their bodies with their authentic, wrong-sex selves, because to disavow this innate wrongness would amount to nothing less than self-annihilation, with suicide almost a rational option.

For as we know, were this hypothetical mother to confront the hypothetical school principal with her unease about the school’s endorsement, nay celebration, of gender identity ideology, the principal would, at best, sermonise about the importance of a “safe and inclusive school environment.” At worst, this hypothetical mother might find that the hypothetical principal suggests, gently or perhaps not so gently, that she re-educate herself out of bigotry and small-mindedness.

Because we might logically conclude that a principal such as this one looks for inspiration to Victoria’s leader, the state’s headmistress if ever there was one, who brooks no scrutiny or dissent on the “gender identity” regime that Labor implemented almost by stealth, probably asleep to its far-reaching consequences, but either way it’s too late now. So now, the Premier Jacinta Allan must crush any attempt to scrutinise “gender affirming” care for minors alienated from their sexed bodies.

Twice last year Allan sought to humiliate and turn on the Murdoch journalists who dared ask her pointed questions at a door stop, sought to embarrass them in the manner of a school principal making an example of a misbehaving student. She was asked why after the findings of the UK’s Cass Review, which cast serious doubt on the science behind transitioning gender-distressed youth, Victoria’s government continued to back affirmative care. Allan rolled her eyes.

She was also asked to respond to the assertions of parents of gender-distressed children — not to mention dissenting doctors and psychiatrists — that there was a “school to gender clinic pipeline” in Victoria. The Premier made a performance of her contempt. Her eyes welled.

These parents were spreading “disgraceful nonsense,” the Premier declared. And the journalists themselves, she told the Herald Sun’s Carly Douglas, should stop their “disgraceful reporting.”

These parents of which the Premier spoke are anonymous but not hypothetical parents — mothers and fathers confronting unimaginable grief as their teenage children identify out of their own futures as parents and lovers via “treatment” likely to render them sterile, sexually dysfunctional and lifelong medical patients.

“Perhaps I was not clear enough in my previous answer,” the Premier said. “I’ll repeat again, transgender kids are 15 times more likely to kill themselves.” In fact the statistic she meant to cite is that “trans kids” are 15 times more likely to attempt suicide — not 15 times more likely to complete it. Never mind that the study itself is the work of a trans-activist group and its methodology heavily criticised. (Some might even call it disgraceful nonsense.)

Two months later at an even more heated door stop, Allan issued an even sterner reprimand to The Australian’s Rachel Baxendale for scrutinising a government policy that allows children to socially transition at school without their parents’ knowledge or consent. Such reporting is “irresponsible,” Allan chastised.

“On this matter … (it) is particularly important we come to these discussions in a responsible way, because we know transgender kids are 15 times more likely to commit suicide,” she said, again — irresponsibly — repeating her false description of the dubious study’s findings.

In the hours after the press conference, a government spokesperson rushed to clarify the Premier’s error about the study, which indeed referred to attempted suicides and not completed ones. But not four months later the Premier, or, perhaps, the ideologues in her office, shared to social media footage of the heated exchange at the press conference, citing it as the reason she was marching in the upcoming Pride rally. Meaning she is marching against the allegedly “irresponsible” and “disgraceful” claims of parents of gender-distressed children and the dissident medical professionals, claims laundered by Murdoch media journalists.

Given this top-down climate of intimidation, it is hardly surprising that the gender-sceptic parent decides not to raise their concerns with the school lest their children suffer payback in the classroom. And so these parents, including our hypothetical mother, keeps mum.

So the pronouns stay in email signatures and the trans flags deck the classrooms and even five year-olds are told they have a “gender identity” that might differ from their “sex assigned at birth,” and on it goes, until one day, surely, surely soon, something will snap and even in the gender theocracy that is Victoria this delirium will end.

Hungary has figured disproportionately in my recent posts. Not there’s anything wrong with going .. eh.. niche — one view of it, my whole Substack is a rhapsody of niche themes — and I was heartened by how many people enjoyed my reflection on the seven-plus hour long apocalyptic arthouse film about the fall of Hungary’s communist regime. All the same, after this piece, and barring sensational developments, I’ll be giving Hungary a rest.

This piece, while technically about Hungary’s Jews, touches on a major paradox of our times, namely, why many people who consider themselves politically liberal are finding succour, or a degree of succour, under illiberal or populist rule — and Viktor Orban, with his bans on “Pride” flags, was the prototype of an illiberal populist. Some of you may have read this piece in The Weekend Australian where it was first published. Still, I hope I can persuade you to read this updated version as it includes more colour, movement and context.

On a separate note: I recently moderated a discussion with three gutsy Jewish women from Oz for our UK comrades at Feminists Against Antisemitism. You can find a link to the recording here.

**

In July 2024, as the war in Gaza raged and Jew-hatred erupted across the globe, I took my older daughter to her late grandparents’ native Hungary to visit family still living there.

My cousin Laszlo “Laci” Fekete is chief cantor at Budapest’s Dohany Street Synagogue, a Moorish Revival architectural gem and one of the largest in Europe. When Laci sings, the ground beneath my feet trembles.

One afternoon, in Laci’s childhood apartment near Budapest’s theatre district, he reached to a top shelf in the hallway for a dusty oil painting, a still life of Judaica: menorah, phylacteries, a prayer shawl and books.

The painting had belonged to his mother and hung for many years in the living room. He told us that during the 1956 Hungarian revolution, as the chant “Russians go home!” rang out from the street below, bullets flew in through the apartment window. (It’s common to find walls in Budapest apartments pockmarked with bullet holes.)

But while the bullets ringed the surrounding wall, the painting was spared.

“No bullets on the frame, nothing.”

The painting, Laci explained, only half-jokingly, is a talisman, enjoying divine protection.

The anecdote (fable?) struck me as an apt metaphor for the present. Even before the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre, the 100,000-strong Jews of Hungary, compared with other diaspora communities after October 7, seemed bulletproof.

These days, as the statistics bear out, it’s safer to wear a skullcap while strolling in Budapest – where haunting shoe sculptures along the banks of the Danube memorialise the tens of thousands of Jews shot into the river by Hungary’s Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944-45 – than in Toronto, London or even New York.

This peculiar good fortune is attributable less to divine will than to that of Hungary’s Viktor Orban – electoral autocrat, anti-immigration hardliner, Israel’s chief defender in Europe and at home the enforcer of a “zero-tolerance” policy on antisemitism. The second half of a legendary bromance with Benjamin Netanyahu. “(Donald) Trump with brains”, according to Tony Abbott, who last week eulogised the former leader for having turned Budapest into “something of a haven for conservative intellectuals”.

Orban was himself a talisman of sorts for the global populist right, until his Fidesz party was emphatically booted from power last weekend after 16 years. During the campaign, Budapest’s streets again rang with the anti-government chant “Russians go home!” – a pointed historical reference to accusations Orban was doing Russia’s bidding.

“Orban’s loss,” wrote Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, “brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief – also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric – that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the ‘real’ people.”

Yet on waking to the news I couldn’t suppress a voice in my head. The voice belonged to my mother, Laci’s aunt, who was trotting out the phrase – as she often did, only half-jokingly – “but is this good for the Jews?”

The question sounds parochial. But the welfare of Jews, history’s archetypal scapegoats, has long served as a barometer of a nation’s overall political health. In this topsy-turvy era, you could plausibly argue that the Jews might, at least in the short term, fare better under Orban’s self-described “illiberal Christian democracy” than under a democracy of the unqualified type.

To be sure, there’s no evidence that Hungary’s new leader Peter Magyar and his centre-right Tisza party are bad, or even lukewarm, for the Jews. Or even for Israel.

Magyar is ex-Fidesz. With the exception of the Russia-Ukraine war – he wants to realign Hungary’s stance with that of Europe to unlock a €16bn loan — his campaign focused little on foreign policy or culture wars. He has said Israel and Hungary would continue to enjoy a “special relationship” based on pragmatism and mutual interest.

Still, Orban was Israel’s veto in the EU; Magyar’s unlikely to be that. I don’t care if the EU imposes sanctions on West Bank settlers, even if the outrage seems selective. I do care about unfair criticisms of Israel’s war against Hamas and proposed trade sanctions, although other EU countries besides Hungary also oppose the latter.

To date, Magyar’s most substantial departure is his flagged reversal of Orban’s decision to exit the International Criminal Court after it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Budapest is the only European capital the Israeli Prime Minister has been game to visit. On Monday, Magyar confirmed that as a member of the ICC, Hungary would act on its arrest warrants and said he had told Netanyahu as much in their first phone call. But he reportedly also invited Netanyahu to a ceremony marking the Hungarian revolution’s 70th anniversary.

So he’s issued Bibi an invitation while making it impossible for him to attend.

My concern is not so much about Magyar or his party as it is about the possibility that a change of guard in Hungary could unleash long-smothered, EU-style progressivism and allow previously banned flags—“LGBTQ” and Palestinian causes—to fly again, both metaphorically and literally.

I fear the prospect of a vibe shift that would spell the end of Hungary as something of a haven for Jews in an increasingly hostile world.

**

I listen as another relative, in his 30s, gushes down the phone about the election result. He tells me he’s been partying hard. The Friday before the poll he went to the massive anti-Orban rock concert at Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. On election night he was at a techno dance party in front of Parliament House; on the riverbank opposite, Magyar and Tisza gathered for the count and what became a victory celebration.

“It was very moving for me as well,” he said. “Usually I’m not emotional about politics. But unanimously, everyone (on the street) was cheerful, cars were honking their horns, people were crying.

“This is coming after 16 years of oppression in a lot of ways. Not just the legal dimension but the ambience. The mood in the country was very sad, as if we were just left behind like there was no future … If you were a successful entrepreneur you left because if Fidesz didn’t like you they would cancel you.”

Finally, I ask: And what about the Jews?

**

My parents, both Holocaust survivors, left Hungary after Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 uprising.

Every few years, we’d return “home” to visit relatives we saw as oppressed—not just as Hungarians, but as Jews living nervously and fearfully under the watchful eye of the state.

During the Cold War the streetscapes were austere but for the red stars crowning the buildings. Even though Hungary was more liberal than other Eastern Bloc states, people still lowered their voices if discussing politics in public.

When we visited in 2007, less than a decade after the Berlin Wall came down, the fear among our relatives was about a resurgent “far-right.” The nativist Jobbik party — the “Movement for a Better Hungary” — had been founded to speak for “true Hungarians,” code for anti-Roma and anti-Jewish sentiment. Sporadic acts of anti-Jewish violence heightened a sense of foreboding; Jewish graves were being desecrated.

Near the neo-Gothic Parliament House one morning, we walked past some winos occupying a park bench. Noticing Laci’s conspicuously Orthodox appearance, one of them waved at the Parliament building and slurred, “All the problems in there are because of the Jews.”

**

I vowed never to return to Hungary.

**

Returning to Hungary in 2024, I found the nation’s Jews out, proud—and loud. No longer speaking in lowered voices as they slurped “Ashkenazy dumpling soup” in Budapest’s cool new restaurants.

There were no “Free Palestine” posters or stickers. (My 30-something relative said he only spotted such a thing once “in the tourist area.”) No calls for intifada or “death to the IDF” – the government would even cancel a performance of Irish band Kneecap and ban it for five more years for good measure. No anti-Zionist protests whatsoever as these were quasi-illegal.

No Islamists preaching jihad because in 2016 Orban defied the EU to close Hungary’s borders to millions of Muslim migrants fleeing the Syrian and other conflicts.

Meanwhile, Jewish communal organisations received generous funding as part of the government’s broader policy of religious “renaissance”. Budapest alone boasts 16 to 25 depending on the count.

We heard Laci sing in a choir at one of the beautifully restored synagogues on Hegedus Gyula Street — one of the songs was a lament from a Jewish-Hungarian solider during World War One.

On Friday night, he took us shul-hopping: we attended services at two beautifully restored synagogues, twice hearing the weekly sermon on the Israelite spies sent into Canaan.

Afterwards, at one of the synagogues, young people filled two large rooms for dinner. At one table, I overheard an Israeli man deep in conversation with two young women — all of them speaking in English. The young rabbi gave a speech in which he noted that his congregation had grown closer since October 7. Everyone sang the Hebrew song, The Whole World is a Very Narrow Bridge, an old favourite at gatherings of this sort.

These young Jews seemed so joyful, so at ease with themselves here in this city where, 80 years ago, their ancestors were shot into the Danube, that I felt a wave of envy and melancholy come over me.

**

The Moorish-revival synagogue on Dohany Street, also known as The Great Synagogue, stands near the edge of the wartime Jewish ghetto in which 70,000 were interned during the Holocaust. The complex includes several memorials, the Heroes’ Temple, a graveyard and a Jewish museum, the latter stands on the site where the house of Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, once stood.

At the time of our visit, Theodor Herzl Square, at the synagogue’s forecourt, was temporarily renamed October 7 square and marked with memorial candles, yellow ribbons and hostage posters. I thought of all the hostage posters torn down in Western cities.

Our guide, a slender young woman, led a walking tour of the area. It was a busy day. Lots of tour groups. An Italian tour group. A tour group of women in hijab— the only time I saw a group of Muslims in Budapest.

An Israeli tour group filed past, and then another and another. The Israelis were boisterous.

“Let’s wait for the Israelis to pass,” our guide said.

At the Raoul Wallenberg Emlékpark (memory park), named in honour of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, our guide stopped.

“And now that we’re here I want to share something with you,” she said.

She told us that a few years ago she had been leafing through some old documents belonging to her father, which had come from his late mother. And she found a “Schutzpasse” or protective passport — designed by Wallenberg, the (fake) protective passports identified the bearers as Swedish subjects and were generally accepted by German and Hungarian authorities.

The guide said this discovery came as a shock: she did not know about her Jewish ancestry. Her father likewise seemed to know little; at first he was wary of her digging, but later more supportive. Ever since then she has been “on a journey” into her family history and the history of the Jews in Hungary, a journey that has taken her to Israel and to here, the Jewish centre of Hungary where she works as a guide.

She said she was “proud” of her Jewish roots.

Before leaving, I asked her if she was optimistic or pessimistic about the Jews’ future in Hungary.

“Optimistic. Budapest is one of the safest places in the Jewish diaspora at the moment, even if I’m not a fan of the prime minister.”

**

Here was the almost universal paradox when it came to Hungary’s Jews. While they acknowledged flourishing under Orban’s rule – since 2023 the recorded instances of anti-Jewish violence are almost non-existent – a fundamental distrust lingered. “I myself could never vote for him but …” Again and again I heard this caveat.

Beneath the surface harmony, there was arguably a darker, more transactional dynamic in the Orban government’s relationship with the Jewish community.

Was it pure coincidence, for instance, that the government’s designated enemies of the state – looming down from billboards – were both Jews? First came the financier George Soros, accused of a subversive globalist agenda of open borders and eroding Christian values; then, at the last election, Volodymyr Zelensky, cast as a malign figure intent on starving Hungary of Russian fuel and dragging it into war – or even, absurdly, attacking it outright.

Take even the quasi-ban on anti-Zionist protests. Writing in K, a journal on European Jewish culture, Janos Gado recounts a disturbing incident in September 2024. Hundreds of Bosnian fans arrived in Budapest for a football match. In the hours before the game, the Bosnians, wearing black uniforms, marched to the Great Synagogue chanting, “Palestine!”

A day later, an Orban associate published a Facebook post addressing the rattled Jewish community. “Dear fellow Jewish citizens!” the post read. “If it were not for this government in Hungary, migrants would be doing the same thing in front of your houses every day.”

The Orban government’s self-congratulatory stance on Jew-hatred was most often deployed as a shield against accusations of what historian Deborah Lipstadt, the US’s former envoy on antisemitism, called “the prevalence of historical distortion of the Holocaust”.

Government museums and memorials depicted Hungarians and Jews alike as victims of Nazi aggression. There was an official effort to rehabilitate the reputation of Hungary’s collaborationist wartime leader, Admiral Miklos Horthy, as a statesman. Nobel prizewinning Jewish writer Imre Kertesz was removed from the school curriculum, while writers with a history of virulent Jew-hatred, including Fidesz co-founder Zsolt Bayer, were lauded in state-controlled media and cultural institutions. Bayer, in a 2011 column, had referred to Jews as “stinking excrement”.

**

“Don’t think that Orban is not antisemitic — because he is,” said Gabor, another of my extended clan, at a family luncheon. For the more than 50 years I’ve known him, Gabor has always worn a square beard and leather jacket. His comment was directed at another relative Ivan, a moustached raconteur who never wastes time on small talk before tucking into politics.

“Look,” Ivan replied, “the Jews were suspicious of him from the beginning because,” — he does air quotes — “far-right.” Of course, Ivan explained, he himself would never vote for Orban, “he’s a politician — corrupt.” He recited a litany of what he regarded as Orban’s wrongs, from crony corporatism to selling the country out to the Chinese Communist Party, saddling Hungary with pollution while northern Europeans drive electric cars, and so on.

“Maybe he is an antisemite. But. He didn’t let in Muslims.

“In France an old Jewish lady is thrown off a building by a young guy and then he goes to court and the judge says,” — he turns on a mock high-pitched voice — ‘“oh poor little drug addict, he’s had such a hard life.’” It is a reference to the controversy over the 2017 killing in Paris of Jewish doctor Sarah Halimi by her jihadist neighbour.

“Well I can tell you this: no Jews are being thrown off buildings in Hungary.”

**

In his piece in K, Gado interrogates the role of historical memory and the Holocaust, in both Western Europe and Orban’s Hungary.

In the latter, World War II could only ever be told as a story in which Hungarians were “heroes or victims”, never perpetrators. The absence of national introspection left Orban free to define antisemitism as a pathology largely confined to the opposition and its liberal media.

By contrast, Western European nations generally accept their complicity in the Holocaust, leading to a crisis of guilt that has spawned liberal policies on immigration, multiculturalism and anti-racism. But these “noble ideals,” Gado writes, have been “misused” to create a newer version of antisemitism in which Israel is characterised as genocidal.

So while Orban attempted to keep a firm grip on “the demons he himself helped to unleash”, humanist Western Europe “is also struggling with demons of its own, unleashed by post-modern Jew-hatred, which speaks the anti-racist language.”

Might post-Orban Hungary gradually trade old antisemitism for the newer, more insidious kind?

Last week, Ivan tells me over the phone that he’s not worried, he feels “very positive” about the more centrist Peter Magyar. Hungary, he insists, is “paradise” for the Jews, unlike the West — and he veers into a rant about leftists and their alliance with Islamists, and how “it’s all because of Qatari money.”

“I’m sorry to use this language but the West can go fuck its ‘human rights.’”

**

After I ask, “And what about the Jews?” my 30-something relative hesitates. The issue has barely come up for him or his friends, he says.

As for cousin Laci, he has no reason to retrieve the talisman oil painting from the top shelf. Orban, he agrees, had to go.

“So I hope this (new government) will be good for us too.”

What unseen cosmic force draws me, on Saturday morning, to check the program at The Astor Theatre, the musky-smelling, art-deco cinema round the corner? Existential malaise? The crappy weather?

Regardless, as soon as I look at the listings, I know resistance is useless. Oh, sure, I could spend the day supermarket shopping. Or attacking the endless mound of laundry. Or writing yet another jeremiad about civilisational collapse. Instead I sign up for a Hungarian black-and-white arthouse epic more than seven hours long.

During troubled times, some find escape through alcohol or drugs or plunging into freezing oceanic waters, or surrendering to music.

And then there are people like me; whose idea of decadent abandonment is sitting in a dark room at a screening of Sátántangó — in English, Satan’s Tango — filmmaker Béla Tarr’s bleak 1994 allegory of post-socialist decay. (Tarr died in January, aged 70, reportedly after a long illness.)

Seven hours.

In Hungarian.

Three years ago I wrote about persuading a friend to accompany me to a screening of About Dry Grasses, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Chekhovian” work of three hours and 17 minutes in which we’re almost literally watching snow melt.

Consider this piece the second in an occasional series on endurance arthouse cinema.

This time, I know it would be futile to try to sweet-talk anyone into joining me. No-one loves me that much. Not even my partner.

I tell him: “Susan Sontag said she’d be glad to see the film every year for the rest of her life.”

“I don’t think that bolsters your case,” he replies.

**

I wolf down my lunch, pack a sandwich for dinner and march towards the Astor. It is 1pm. I will not return home till long after dark.

**

At the cinema, I grab an aisle seat just as I do on aeroplanes. A seven-hour long apocalyptic, Hungarian, art film being similar to a long-haul flight.

Looking around, I’m stunned to see that not only is there a reasonable turnout, but the crowd skews… young! Grungy, as we Gen X’ers say, Goth’y, black-wearing, don’t-get-much-sunlight-at-the-best-of-times young, but nonetheless — young! Young people signing up for a seven hour Hungarian epic! There is hope yet for the TikTok generation.

A few rows behind me a man and woman sit on either side of someone who appears to be a child. A child? Someone should notify child protection. Another woman walks to her seat carrying a cooler bag and a pillow.

The lights go down.

**

In the darkness, I take notes. Not shorthand; I don’t trust myself with it in the dark. I’m conscious of how strange this feels, putting pen to paper; it no longer feels completely natural.

When I look at my notebook afterwards, the script resembles that of a disturbed individual: words colliding, sentences scrawled on top of one another.

First frame

mediumshot decrepit farmhouse

boggy earthsky grey

howling wind

Be ck ett

Should I be making notes at all? Doesn’t this mean I’m observing myself watching the film? Shouldn’t I be giving myself over to the experience— isn’t that the point of buying a ticket to a seven-hour long Hungarian, arthouse classic?

**

Partial Spoiler Alert: in case you were planning on seeing Sátántangó some time soon.

The film is based on the 1985 novel of the same name by László Krasznahorkai.

It is set in a forgotten rural hamlet in the dying years of the communist regime, during a long, long winter.

We watch the first frame, the farmhouse and boggy field, for several minutes. Finally, a herd of cows emerge from the dilapidated buildings. Some cows mount other cows. The cows wander aimlessly and then disperse.

This is not Orwell’s animal farm because there is no industry here.

Nothing grows in the bog. No-one works in the village except for the prostitutes (who service a dribble of clients in an abandoned mill), the publican (who is the victim of a shakedown) and the spiders. The people lie, cheat, steal, prey relentlessly on weakness, covet their neighbour’s wife —especially one wife with inviting breasts. At night they drink themselves into oblivion.

The camera lingers on broken stoves. Peeling plaster. Smashed windows. A toilet — waste is the only bountiful produce. A truck with only one functioning windscreen wiper, which is a problem because the rain never stops. Flimsy curtains hang in windows as, outside, the rain falls and falls. It will rain until spring. There is a “stench,” one character tells us, that comes from the earth itself.

The old order is crumbling, but no-one knows yet what freedom tastes like. Except, perhaps, for the horses that manage to flee the slaughterhouse. The uncertainty renders the villagers vulnerable to charlatans and false prophets; one, a bloke who has been absent from the village, seeds a rumour that he has risen from the dead. He and his sidekick return to the farm offering redemption, a new beginning, a promised land just across the plains.

As a handful of gullible villagers prepare for their doomed exodus, they smash up leftover furniture so the gypsies won’t claim it.

**

The film is broken into chapters with titles such as “Irimiás Gives A Speech,” “Unravelling,” “The Devil’s Tit” and “The Perspective from the Front.”

**

I stop taking notes.

I’m thinking about time.

How I have traded a day of my life for this film.

In trading a day of my life for this film I’m acutely conscious of time passing. Partly because the film obsessively marks time with sound. So many aural assaults: the loud ticking of a clock, the shrieking wind, the trickle of urine on a toilet bowl, an embellished anecdote repeated over and over by a drunkard, an accordion wailing the same tune over and over. The lashing of rain.

The menacing clang of church bells — but how can that be? The bell tower of the nearest church was destroyed during the war and hasn’t been fixed since.

And the narrative too keeps looping back. Intermittently the action stops entirely in a freeze frame. We think there is forward momentum only to find we’re going over the same event, traversing the same boggy ground, from the perspective of a different character. We return again and again to a scene in a pub, where half a dozen drunken, unhappy characters dance around and around with an air of manic fatalism.

Time flies. Time flies when you’re having fun, or even when you’re not. Time flies even in an extreme long shot of a person disappearing into an empty field, the figure getting smaller and smaller.

One excruciating scene, in which a little girl tortures a cat — later I learn it caused considerable controversy overseas—goes on and on.

Dear God. When will it end?

**

Two men hunched in dark overcoats walk down an empty road in the local town at night. We watch them from behind. The scene is wild, dreamlike. The wind hurls debris along the road. Pieces of paper scatter in the wind. Pages from a failed manifesto?

**

There are two intermissions. Twice we return to reality. Twice I visit the toilet. After the first intermission, as the film resumes, the lights accidentally stay on for several minutes.

At the second intermission I eat my sandwich and treat myself to an ice cream for the final stretch.

Between the intermissions time flies even though the time on the screen freezes or slides backwards.

One character, a doctor, gives himself insulin shots. He leaves the house only when he runs out of fruit brandy. His every breath is labour. He peers out the window, at the goings on in the farm and in his notebook tries to write an objective account. Tries to craft a narrative, a bit like I was doing in the beginning, taking notes in the dark. On the chaos and cruelty and emptiness he tries to impose coherence.

Is the self-harming doctor a proxy for the auteur/the novelist/the audience?

Is the clanging really that of church bells?

Long after the credits have run, the sound still echoes.

**

When I step outside it is dark and the pavement is wet, and Viktor Orban rules Hungary, and Donald Trump America, and the war against the evil Iranian regime is still raging and economists are warning of recession ahead.

But I’m almost skipping home because I’ve watched the seven-plus soul-crushing hours of Sátántangó and nothing could have made me happier.

And it’s only once I’m through the front door that the rain begins to pour.

Last night three of us in our household settled in for the ABC’s coverage of the South Australian election. (Sadly, this is what we call a good time.) At about 10.30pm, I said I was too tired to stay up for Premier Peter (“Mali”) Malinauskas’s victory speech — I knew what he was going to say anyway — and got up from the couch, but then drifted back into the living room in time to catch …

poetry!!!

Amid

acknowledgment of country

and obligatory praise for “the mighty union movement,”

and “our families make huge sacrifices,”

and “I’m humbled,” “such a huge responsibility,”

the triumphant centrist Premier of a backwater state*

Bursts

into

POETRY!!!!

And the government media unit

doth melteth down

(* Actually, not so much of a backwater anymore: thanks partly to the Malinauskas government’s competent rule, SA is rising, goading its bankrupt and dystopian Victorian neighbour by stealing major events such as the Motorcycle Grand Prix.)

The Premier recited Henry Lawson’s poem The Duty of Australians to advocate for a progressive “Aussie” patriotism that loves the flag (finally!) but is more “laid-back” and inclusive of cultural diversity than nationalism in the US and Europe. He brought out the poetry in response to the populist surge of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which, in a historic result, appears to have won more primary votes than the Liberals. Notably, Mali’s references to One Nation were respectful.

Watching Mali’s recital:

1. My throat went tight and eyes welled. Could this be the birth of a movement to bring poetry back into the classroom? To return Donne and Wordsworth and Plath to a school curriculum at once cluttered and hollowed-out by successive Labor education bureaucrats in thrall to anti-intellectual fads of one sort or another?

2. On the other hand, as a snooty Melburnian — snooty even without the Motorcycle Grand Prix — I wondered if Mali’s performance was akin to a provincial mayor breaking into the The Gettysburg Address after a hard-fought debate about bin night.

3. I finally thought, well done Mali for his repeated genuine attempts to defend the besieged political centre. Given the occasion I’ll overlook his resort to euphemisms: “It’s been a hot summer in Australia. Something we should all look forward to is the temperature coming down just a little bit.” The “hot summer,” I assume, was a reference to the Islamic-state inspired Bondi Beach massacre.

Today, the Prime Minister, speaking at an event recognising Vietnamese Australians, warned, also euphemistically, about the threat from One Nation’s divisive politics.

“We need to be vigilant. There are some, including some in political life [who] want to turn back the clock to an Australia that is no longer who we are, and we need to call out those people, and we need to continue to cherish our diversity as a strength for our nation, which it is,” Mr Albanese said.

Fine. But Albo needs to plainly call out all threats to our civic health, especially the ones from his side of the ledger. No good rolling out the “diversity is our strength” mantra when on Friday, while attending Eid prayers at Lakemba, in western Sydney, Islamists called the PM a “putrid dog” and “genocide supporter” and chased him out of the mosque.

If you still have the stamina, the following piece, lightly edited, was first published two days before the SA election in the UK-based UnHerd, and stands up well in the aftermath, I’m pleased to say. It tracks the evolution of Hansonism through the lens of political satire: who gets to take the piss out of whom.

(And if afterwards you still have the stamina, read this compelling piece on Hansonism from my friend Paul Tyson.)

**

This weekend, voters in South Australia (SA) go to the polls in an election that has right-wing pundits in a knot of excitement — despite the winner being a foregone conclusion. Peter Malinauskas, the state’s wildly popular Labor premier, described as “a heat-seeking missile for the political centre”, will prevail without a single bead of sweat on his handsome brow. Instead, it’s a heat-seeking missile for the populist Right who is drawing attention: Pauline Hanson, alumna of Dancing With the Stars, star of her own “anti-woke” film, A Super Progressive Movie — and founder of the insurgent One Nation party.

Hanson, a former fish-and-chip shop owner from Queensland, debuted on Australia’s political scene as a dis-endorsed Liberal candidate 30 years ago, around the same time Nigel Farage burst into public view in Britain. In her maiden speech, she warned that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”. Since then, she’s come and gone as an animating force on the far Right — and the bête noire of the cultural elite — switching targets over the years from Asians to Muslims. Just last month, she told Sky News that there are no “good” Muslims.

Such views have long kept Hanson on the fringe of Australian politics. At May’s federal election, One Nation won 6% support, concentrated in regional Australia.

But within months, its status as a fringe party began to change. By September its standing in the polls hit double digits. In the aftermath of the Islamic State-inspired Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre in December, which left 15 dead, including a 10-year-old girl, One Nation’s rise is so steep that even cautious pundits are breathless. “I am shocked [by] every poll I see — and I do this for a living,” Australian National University’s political scientist Jill Sheppard told the ABC. “This is not a blip,” added the Sydney Morning Herald’s James Massola, “One Nation’s rise is real.” “Drastic” is how pollster Kos Samaras puts it. One Nation’s surge, he suggests, is “a contagion.” The weekend’s election will be the first to test if the “contagion,” which is as high as 30% in some national polls, translates into actual votes.

The next, and perhaps more telling, litmus test is a federal by-election on 9 May in Farrer, a seat in regional New South Wales vacated by Sussan Ley, deposed last month as leader of the centre-right Liberal Party and head of the conservative Liberal-National Coalition. (This fact alone tells you something about the disarray on Australia’s mainstream Right.) Further along, Victorians will go to the ballot box in November. Victoria is home to Australia’s most ardent progressives. Its state capital, Melbourne, is the only one in the country regularly cited by an indigenous name, Naarm; its five-year-olds are encouraged to express a “gender identity” in school. Even here, or maybe especially here, One Nation is going gangbusters.

As with Reform’s trajectory in the UK, One Nation’s surge was initially a response to the implosion of the centre right, to which it now poses an existential threat. (Some polls have the Liberal-National Coalition as low as the teens.) But latterly, Hanson has started eating into Labor’s support too. The pollster Samaras, well-versed in the French economist Thomas Piketty’s theory of the “great realignment”, is not surprised. Labor, Samaras has warned, has shed its identity as a party of the working class in favour of the identity-obsessed “Brahmin Left”, with an electoral reckoning only a matter of time.

Still, the most jaw-dropping measure of the national mood is the sheer number of Australians who admit to being, shall we say, One Nation-curious. According to a Guardian poll last month, nearly 60% of the country said they’d be open to voting for the party at the next federal election, including nearly half of current Labor voters.

Of course, many of these One Nation-curious voters probably won’t end up taking the plunge; and in any case, raw support for One Nation won’t necessarily deliver them a slew of seats. In South Australia, the minor party surge will likely erode the Liberals’ primary vote to Labor’s advantage. The already enfeebled opposition is confronting the prospect of holding fewer than five of the 47 lower house seats; electoral oblivion beckons.

Still, to concentrate on this risks missing the main point, which is that such things aren’t meant to happen here. Australia’s political sensibility has long been grounded in the centre, largely because of structural factors such as preferential and compulsory voting. But national ethos, character — these are also real. We’re accustomed to seeing our distance from Europe and the US as philosophical as well as geographical: radicalism isn’t for us. We like to think we still believe in the “fair go”. We like taking the piss.

A recent Resolve poll offers glimpses of what’s fuelling the anti-establishment mood. One person told pollsters, “the major parties are just arguing in parliament about ISIS brides while the world’s burning!” Another was “leaning towards One Nation because at least Pauline loves her country”. The public mood, then, is dark. People are angry at the political class for not focusing enough on a cost of living crisis that was already acute before the fuel shock from the Iran war. And they are angry at the taboo that surrounds immigration, in particular the importing of Islamic extremism.

So Australians are breaking their own taboo against flirting with the feral. Or, more accurately, the definition of feral has undergone a sharp revision since the late Nineties.

Let’s return for a moment to Australians’ fondness for taking the piss. Aside from her poll numbers, we also could track the mainstreaming of Pauline Hanson to a seismic shift in the political economy of satire; as in, who takes the piss out of whom. Six weeks after her “swamped by Asians” speech, a TV journalist asked Hanson, “Are you xenophobic?” To which she responded: “Please explain.” The soundbite became late-Nineties shorthand for small-minded racism. “Pauline Pantsdown,” a drag queen, savagely parodied her. Outside the (redneck) Sunshine State of Queensland, people rejected Hanson’s nostalgia for the era of restrictive immigration known as the White Australia Policy, officially only scrapped in the Seventies but already sounding like an echo from ancient history.

Hanson’s first act flamed out by 1998, when she lost her seat. Scandal and infighting plagued her party. She spent 11 weeks in jail for electoral fraud before her conviction was overturned. Then, in 2016, she returned to the Australian Senate just in time for Donald Trump’s first term, now insisting Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Muslims”. While Islam is Australia’s second-largest religion and one of the fastest growing, thanks largely to a steady intake of refugees, the percentage of Muslims in Australia is roughly half that of Britain. All the same, as net migration peaked at 556,000 in 2023 and Australia’s much-vaunted prosperity came under increasing strain, the fragile consensus began to fracture.

The Coalition’s Peter Dutton, who had himself warned in 2018 that people in Melbourne were too scared to go out to restaurants because of “African gangs,” went to last year’s election vowing to boost housing affordability by cutting permanent migration and tightening caps on international students. The polls were hot for him until they weren’t. Like Canada’s failed populist conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, he was viewed as Trump-adjacent and his rivals weren’t. Steady-as-she-goes is the Australian default. So, Anthony Albanese’s Labor wiped the floor with the Coalition, winning 94 of 150 constituencies. Dutton lost his seat. Still, Labor had secured only a third of the vote — preferences from the Greens, independents and minor parties did the rest. Sound familiar?

Reeling, the Coalition installed the moderate Sussan Ley as its doomed leader. She made ambiguous vanilla pronouncements on everything contentious, including immigration. Within two months of the election, One Nation started its rise.

The Liberals’ traditional base of affluent voters had already embraced the socially-conscious “Teal” independents. Now the Coalition was bleeding support from its Right flank. Defections ensued. Barnaby Joyce, the florid former leader of the National Party of Australia and deputy prime minister, jumped ship to join One Nation, citing disagreement with the party’s stance on renewable energy and immigration.

In November, meanwhile, Hanson had turned up to the Senate dressed in a burqa (she did the same thing in 2017). Critics decried it as a divisive stunt. Then came the Bondi attack and suddenly her alarmism about Islamist terrorists didn’t seem all that foolish. Unlike Australia’s Prime Minister. In the days after the attack, Albanese only spoke about the failures in gun control and the extremist threat from neo-Nazis. As former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg said in a lacerating speech from the massacre site, “if you’re unable to say those words — radical Islamist ideology,” then you can’t begin to address it. Albanese was forced into announcing a public inquiry into the Bondi massacre and antisemitism more broadly.

But while “Albo” often struggles to read the public mood, he’s gifted at what he calls “fighting Tories”. And certainly at “wedging” them. His legislative response to Bondi — gun control measures together with tougher hate speech penalties — rankled dissidents in the rural-based Nationals and spelled the beginning of the end for Ley. Last week, the Nationals’ leader David Littleproud humbly resigned. He explained: “I’m buggered.”

Amid all the drama, there came a point when our household started following One Nation’s animated satirical web series titled — you guessed it — Please Explain. It’s funny. It takes the piss out of everyone in Canberra. Somehow, Hanson had amassed enough cultural capital to become the one cracking the jokes at the elites’ expense. Her recently released A Super Progressive Movie, features “King Albo”, his transgender “daughter”, and the relentlessly persecuted hero, Pete, a “cisgender straight white male”. It had achieved its aims even before its release, when iTunes pulled Holly Valance’s theme song and a Melbourne cinema cancelled its screening on staff “safety” grounds — before un-cancelling it. As for its content, the movie is most interesting for its critique of the Left’s obsession with race. A running gag has the “Naarm” brigade trying to fit in with what they assume are the cultural norms of the redneck outback.

When a party knows how to make people laugh, it knows how to tap the zeitgeist. To downplay the relevance of this is to live in a fantasy universe, and a dangerous one at that. But Hanson’s rise is — forgive the cliché — no laughing matter. She is simultaneously a beneficiary and a driver of political fragmentation and polarisation; a warning sign of the ailing health of Australian democracy.

During Hanson’s first act, the Coalition joined Labor to starve One Nation of preferences in an attempt to beat back the overt racialism she had introduced to the political discourse. We don’t know what they’ll do now. In any event, the Nationals’ new leader, Matt Canavan, seems more willing to take Hanson on. He has attacked her no “good” Muslim remark as divisive. Angus Taylor, the new Liberal leader, was more limp. Caught between a rock and a cliff face, he took power backing a reduction in “bad immigration”. “The starting point for me is values,” Taylor recently told a conservative think tank. “Are these people going to come to this country and bring the hatred and violence of another part of the world onto our shores?”

This is all very well — but it’s Albanese who really needs to adopt such a line. More than that, he needs to signal that he won’t be cowed by sections of Labor’s constituency and a broader Left inclined to go soft on political Islam. On this score, he might follow the lead of Labor premiers. Chris Minns from New South Wales, has warned the pro-Hamas brigade “Australia is just not the country for you”; South Australia’s Malinauskas has meanwhile expressed disgust at the platforming of an arguably pro-Hamas writer at the taxpayer-funded Adelaide Writers’ Week (she was later disinvited and the event was cancelled).

It falls on Albanese — who else? — to restore trust in the institution of government at a volatile, combustible moment. Because as Hanson’s opponents scramble to calibrate their message, the One Nation leader remains as abrasively authentic as ever. A management coach, writing in the Australian Financial Review, remarked on her faltering style of speech and why it works for her. “The tight throat, the shallow breathing, the quaver that appears under pressure,” suggested Louise Mahler, “is congruent with her message…She sounds exactly like someone defending territory.”

It’s time the leaders from Australia’s political centre began defending theirs.

On the weekend, I headed to my country homestead for some restorative time. I’ve been bone-tired lately as if my body is finally catching up with my spiritual disorientation; it’s been a long two-and-a-half years since October 7.

At the property, I sit on the back terrace and gaze out at grassy paddocks, a dam fringed with lily pads, rolling hills. A small cluster of horses, three white, two brown, calmly grazing. One hot day my partner and I watched them rush into the dam, rearing with pleasure, and to us city slickers the whole scene appeared other-worldly, as if sprung from the land of myth.

So there I was gazing out at my pastoral idyll, intermittently chipping away at a discursive essay about the latest outrages in the annals of gender identity ideology (that essay is coming soon), when history came marching in. Like a tropical storm breaking the airless heat. A flash of lightning and crack of thunder in a big sky. Within hours of the unleashing of Epic Fury, the US-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the butcher of Tehran, was no more.

I’d long fantasised about such a moment. It always felt personal with the Ayatollahs. As a child I’d internalised the footage of revolutionary fanatics laying siege to the US Embassy in Tehran. As an adult I remembered the 1994 suicide bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85; an atrocity linked to Hezbollah and Iran. And the curated Jew hatred: the state-sponsored Holocaust cartoon contests aimed at denying the Jewish past to justify obliterating the Jewish future.

Iran had even threatened to boycott the London Olympics on the grounds the event’s logo — which showed the numbers 2012 in four jagged multicoloured figures — resembled the word “Zion” and was therefore “racist.” I was reminded of that one yesterday when I searched through my archive of Iran columns for The Age.

The news of Khamenei’s dispatch brought tears — of relief. Of joy. By all accounts he’s feeling joyous too, what with his bounty of celestial virgins, his tasting “the sweet nectar of martyrdom,” as the newsreader on Iranian state TV described it.

On Australia’s state TV, by contrast, senior reporter John Lyons was ashen-faced. He cited the joint statement from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles that Australia “stood with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against ­oppression”. This statement, Lyons said, was “political propaganda.” Because if the PM and Co were being honest they would say, ‘‘Australia stands with Israel and the US in their new war on Iran.’”

Surely, it’s “Iran,” that’s been waging a very long war: against the US and Israel, against Australia, allegedly directing at least two terror attacks on our soil, on its own reason enough for Albo to back the US-Israeli operation, never mind Tehran’s web of terror proxies that have inflicted misery on Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, inflicted the atrocities of October 7 that precipitated Gaza being reduced to rubble. Never mind the Iranian women beaten, raped and killed in prison for showing their hair, the tens of thousands of protestors the regime since January — since the 1979 revolution! — slaughtered for their pursuit of freedom, including freedom of the press.

If the last few days have shown anything it’s the lofty neo-colonialism of the Western intellectual left. No doubt you’ve heard ex-pat Iranians tell of the ecstatic phone calls from loved ones at home, celebrating as the bombs fall around them, daring to hope. I’m not saying they speak for the majority — we cannot know either way. But you’ll find conspicuously more actual Iranians rallying for a Free Iran alongside Jews in London, Toronto and Melbourne than at the anti-Israel protests down the road from them. To put it in terms the Marxist left might understand: their strange alliance with Islamists notwithstanding, their movement is so very “white.”

If Lyons was being honest he’d say, “Australia stands with Israel and the US in their new war on Iran’s despicable, illegitimate theocratic regime.”

Or maybe not. He even struggles to acknowledge the US is making a stand in its own interests. “The United States, driven by Israel, has decided this is a historic opportunity to change (the) regime in Iran … this is what Israel wants …” In response to Donald Trump’s weekend speech justifying the war that reprised Iran’s checklist of crimes against Americans, Lyons said: “That speech could have been written and delivered by (Israeli Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Lyons is hardly the only journo who has dubbed this Israel’s war. (Note this uncharacteristically crude analysis from Andrew Sullivan.)

So here we are again. With the Jewish puppeteers controlling global events, ventriloquising through no less than Donald Trump himself, famous for veering off-script and choosing his own adventure. Even Trump is putty in their hands, prepared to act without heed to his nation’s own complicated strategic interests. How do they do it? This “shitty little country,” as that French diplomat once described the Jewish state only 10-million in all? How does this squirt of a country time and again exert outsize influence on a near 350 million-strong global superpower led, as it happens, by a party that American Jews, themselves only 2.4 per cent of the total, overwhelming do not vote for?

**

For now my friends and family in Israel are stuck in shelters glued to their phones — my texts are answered instantaneously.

Perhaps you’ve heard that this war plays out during the Jewish festival of Purim, which commemorates events that played out in Persia. Essentially, the heroine of the story, Queen Esther, secured the Jews a last-minute reprieve from genocide at the hands of the evildoer, Haman — and in a dramatic reversal of fortune he and his goons were wiped out instead. I’ve always had a soft spot for this story because it is absent the reliably overbearing character of the bloke in the sky, grounded instead in secular machinations: palace intrigue, sexual excess (the tale opens with a days-long orgy) espionage and subterfuge.

The bloodless war is a fantasy. Death rains on civilians across the region as it always does. And this war may yet bring unintended and catastrophic consequences, and we must listen carefully to those making such predictions.

But supporting the status quo, believing that Iran’s regime can be contained or negotiated into submission, also amounts to taking a position. Persisting with business-as-usual is not a morally neutral stance.

I take history as my guide. Not the history of the Book of Esther or of Persian myth, but the record of the blood-soaked 49 years since the Islamic revolution, the obfuscation and deception of the Iranian regime, its refusal to relinquish its nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions, its colonialist fever-dream of annihilating Israel and dominating the broader region - against which it’s now lashing out like a wild octopus — just as it dominates the bodies of women back home. Its enduring, malignant duplicity.

I’m hard wired to support this war. I’m prepared to believe, or at least to hope, that the hostilities can bring Iran a form of deliverance even with Trump at the helm.

I can handle the bifurcation of Trump’s assault on democracy at home and his potential to liberate other peoples abroad and the need to fight the former and cheer on the latter.

Because it’s not reality’s job to flatter my worldview.